Xinghui Yan: Hello everyone, my name is Xinghui and i'm a PhD candidate from university of Michigan Ann arbor, it is my great pleasure to.
Xinghui Yan: Present work collaborating with my colleagues, Shriti Raj, Bingjian Huang, professors Sun Young Park and Mark W. Newman on exploring different smartwatch interfaces for lightweight in-situ self-reporting.
Xinghui Yan: In-situ self reporting is an important component in research studies to collect data about participants subjective experience, such as symptom perception and mood.
Xinghui Yan: With smartwatches, participants have easier access to self-report systems and can contribute data anytime and anywhere with less recalling bias.
Xinghui Yan: However, frequent self-reports are often burdensome because participants need to make a response in dynamic contexts.
Xinghui Yan: Research shows that single-item self-reporting for smartwatches helps reduce user burden. For example, participants can answer a question with glances and a simple tap on the screen.
Xinghui Yan: However, we do not know if basic input methods are still useful under various life scenarios. Also, it is a central challenge to make an input on the small touchscreen.
Xinghui Yan: Hence, we were motivated to explore if there are alternative input techniques that make self-reporting less burdensome?
Xinghui Yan: We ask the following question: how is the user experience of self-reporting affected by different types of interface designs across a variety of contexts?
Xinghui Yan: To answer this question, we first identified input gestures, input continuity and option layouts as key dimensions and proposed 8 design probes varying in these dimensions.
Xinghui Yan: To answer a rating scale question, users either perform a continuous gesture or select a response through multiple repetitive inputs. We refer to this attribute as input continuity.
Xinghui Yan: We also consider different option layouts, varying from displaying one single option using card layout or multiple options in a hierarchical layout. For more details about design probes, please refer to our paper.
Xinghui Yan: In-situ self-report tasks in general only take seconds to complete.
Xinghui Yan: This suggests that more nuances in user experience may be seen from a qualitative perspective by understanding participants’ perception and attitudes toward different interface designs.
Xinghui Yan: As an initial step, we conducted an in-lab user study with 24 participants. Participants used 3 randomly selected interfaces under three simulated scenarios, gaming, walking, and social chatting.
Xinghui Yan: These scenarios varied in one’s physical or cognitive attention available for the self-report task.
Xinghui Yan: After each self-report task, we held mini interviews to probe participants’ reactions to interface designs.
Xinghui Yan: Overall we found that there is not a one-size-fits all self-report interface design across different contexts.
Xinghui Yan: Participants’ mobility, cognitive engagement, and hand-occupation, interact with option layouts and gestures to affect participants’ preference.
Xinghui Yan: The perceived precedence of these factors vary with context, and therefore participants show a changing attitude toward a single interface.
Xinghui Yan: For example, tapping techniques were simple in general, but were thought more difficult to use than drawing numbers when talking to another person due to the social appropriateness.
Xinghui Yan: In particular, participants reacted more positively towards continuous gestures when they were more sedentary.
Xinghui Yan: On the contrary, in mobile situation, participants preferred to use discrete input gestures because they have less requirement on precision.
Xinghui Yan: Meanwhile, we observed two strategies that participants actively developed to reduce perceived demand.
Xinghui Yan: These include micro-scheduling and adopting eyes-free interaction. With micro-scheduling, some participants arranged one opportune moment or several moments for a self-report task.
Xinghui Yan: For example, the hierarchical layout allowed participants to catch up with main activities between the first and second level of option selection.
Xinghui Yan: Also, after some practice, participants could leverage the physical frame of smartwatch to locate options or count gesture inputs to select a numerical response without looking at the screen.
Xinghui Yan: These strategies helped participants better fit a self-report task into main activities. We discussed the implications for future design.
Xinghui Yan: The first is to consider the context of use when designing self-report interfaces. One way is to prioritize interface designs for key sampling contexts.
Xinghui Yan: If a self-report measure is frequently delivered in stable condition, designers may consider continuous gestures that also enable eyes-free interaction to minimize the disruption.
Xinghui Yan: Also, there might be an opportunity to adopt a pair of complementary input gestures on one layout to cover different contexts.
Xinghui Yan: The observation of users’ strategies implies that self-report interface design should go beyond the requirement of simple and brief interactions.
Xinghui Yan: Designers may think how to support users’ strategies like micro-scheduling and support eyes-free interaction. For more details, please refer to our paper.
Xinghui Yan: This brings us to the end of our talk. I would like to thank my advisors Mark Newman and Sun Young Park and the great research team to make this happen. Thank you very much for listening to my talk and I am happy to take any questions.