BubbleNet: A Cyber Security Dashboard for Visualizing Patterns

The field of cyber security is faced with ever‐expanding amounts of data and a constant barrage of cyber attacks. Within this space, we have designed BubbleNet as a cyber security dashboard to help network analysts identify and summarize patterns within the data. This design study faced a range of interesting constraints from limited time with various expert users and working with users beyond the network analyst, such as network managers. To overcome these constraints, the design study employed a user‐centered design process and a variety of methods to incorporate user feedback throughout the design of BubbleNet. This approach resulted in a successfully evaluated dashboard with users and further deployments of these ideas in both research and operational environments. By explaining these methods and the process, it can benefit future visualization designers to help overcome similar challenges in cyber security or alternative domains.     

基于ALV模型的CSCW用户界面设计

智能Agent越来越多地应用于用户界面设计。通过使用Agent,用户界面(也包括整个系统)就被分解为不同的可以互相通信的Agent。界面Agent作为用户与系统之间的中介,使得用户的输入不再是方法的调用,而是以通信的方式完成当前的任务。介绍了基于Agent的用户界面模型ALV,并以ALV模型为基础,结合XML技术,阐述了一种在CSCW环境下的DoctorCAD系统的Agent界面组件开发方法;重点阐述了在界面定制的实现方法,并提出了Personal Wizard的设计思想及方法。     

Building user commitment to implementing a knowledge management strategy

In the IS literature, commitment is typically considered to involve organizational or managerial support for a system and not that of its users. This paper however reports on a field study involving 16 organizations that attempted to build user involvement in developing a knowledge management strategy by having them design it. Twenty-two IT-supported group workshops (involving 183 users) were run to develop action plans for better knowledge management that users would like to see implemented. Each workshop adopted the same problem structuring technique to assist group members develop a politically feasible action plan to which they were psychologically and emotionally dedicated. In addition to reviewing the problem structuring method, this paper provides qualitative insight into the factors a knowledge management strategy should have to encourage user commitment.     

Shifting knowledge from analysis to design: requirements for contextual user interface development

There is consensus among the members of the HCI community as well as among software developers that work tasks and user characteristics (i.e. context) should play a leading role in the course of system development. There seems to be less consensus on how the information about users and work tasks should be acquired and subsequently moved to the design process of a development project. Due to the use of unifying methods and concepts--such as object-orientation-- that might be used for analysis, design and implementation, this transition seems to be facilitated. However, few inputs have been provided to guide developers on how to shift knowledge from analysis to design when task- and user knowledge are considered to be inherent parts of the development knowledge. This paper details the interface between analysis and design, reviews existing concepts to bridge the gap between the two phases of development, and enriches these findings with some empirical results from a survey with respect to practical experiences. From these findings, requirements to successfully shift knowledge in the early phases of software development have been derived.     

Direct hand touchable interactions in augmented reality environments for natural and intuitive user experiences

Several studies have been carried out on augmented reality (AR)-based environments that deal with user interfaces for manipulating and interacting with virtual objects aimed at improving immersive feeling and natural interaction. Most of these studies have utilized AR paddles or AR cubes for interactions. However, these interactions overly constrain the users in their ability to directly manipulate AR objects and are limited in providing natural feeling in the user interface. This paper presents a novel approach to natural and intuitive interactions through a direct hand touchable interface in various AR-based user experiences. It combines markerless augmented reality with a depth camera to effectively detect multiple hand touches in an AR space. Furthermore, to simplify hand touch recognition, the point cloud generated by Kinect is analyzed and filtered out. The proposed approach can easily trigger AR interactions, and allows users to experience more intuitive and natural sensations and provides much control efficiency in diverse AR environments. Furthermore, it can easily solve the occlusion problem of the hand and arm region inherent in conventional AR approaches through the analysis of the extracted point cloud. We present the effectiveness and advantages of the proposed approach by demonstrating several implementation results such as interactive AR car design and touchable AR pamphlet. We also present an analysis of a usability study to compare the proposed approach with other well-known AR interactions.     

A Context-Aware Interaction Model for the Analysis of Users’ QoE in Mobile Environments

This article describes a novel approach to model the quality of experience (QoE) of users in mobile environments. The context-aware and ratings interaction model (CARIM) addresses the open questions of how to quantify user experiences from the analysis of interaction in mobile scenarios, and how to compare different QoE records to each other. A set of parameters are used to dynamically describe the interaction between the user and the system, the context in which it is performed and the perceived quality of users. CARIM structures these parameters into a uniform representation, supporting the dynamic analysis of interaction to determine QoE of users and enabling the comparison between different interaction records. Its run-time nature allows applications to make context- and QoE-based decisions in real time to adapt themselves, and thus provide a better experience to users. As a result, CARIM provides unified criteria for the inference and analysis of QoE in mobile scenarios. Its design and implementation can be integrated (and easily extended if needed) into many different development environments. An experiment with real users comparing two different interaction designs and validating user behavior hypotheses proved the effectiveness of applying CARIM for the assessment of QoE in mobile applications.     

Action research in user-centred product development

Technological development and increased international competition have imposed a significant burden on the product development function of many companies. The growing complexity of products demands a larger product development team with people having various competencies. Simultaneously the importance of good quality, usability and customisation of products is growing, and many companies want to involve customers and users directly in the development work. Both the complexity and quality demand new ways of working that support collaboration between people with various competencies, interests and responsibilities both inside and outside the company. This paper reports experiences from using action research to introduce new user-centred work practices in two commercial product development projects. The interventions varied. In the first project it was found rewarding to engage customers and users in workshops based on participatory inquiry and collaborative design. The design process was iterative and the workshops took place several times involving concept through detailed design. In the second project, new design representations are introduced. The experiences highlight the importance of creating and reifying insights in design representations and using these to both support collaboration, and create continuity in the project. The paper ends with a discussion of scientific rigor in action research and what the new work practices imply for the development team.     

RoleVR: Multi-experience in immersive virtual reality between co-located HMD and non-HMD users

In this study, we present RoleVR, which can provide a similar high level of presence and multi experience for co-located head-mounted display (HMD) and Non-HMD users in an asymmetric virtual reality (VR) environment. The core of RoleVR is distinguishing the difference between the asymmetric environments (in terms of the system and the experience) of HMD and Non-HMD users to design optimized roles for these users. Here, we assign HMD user with spatial role that maximizes the sense of space based on three-dimensional visual information, and we assign Non-HMD user with temporal role in which they take control of communication and action, and understand the overall situation according to the flow of time. We also design an interaction for walking and a hand interface to enhance presence. This is achieved by understanding the user’s role, thereby improving the immersion. Finally, we created an asymmetric VR application that considers the interaction between roles and performed survey-based experiments to verify the basic presence and multi-experience of users in RoleVR. Through this process, we confirmed that RoleVR provides satisfactory presence for co-located HMD and Non-HMD users, and a variety of experiences specialized for each role.

     

Identifying user geolocation with Hierarchical Graph Neural Networks and explainable fusion

Determining user geolocation from social media data is essential in various location-based applications — from improved transportation/supply management, through providing personalized services and targeted marketing, to better overall user experiences. Previous methods rely on the similarity of user posting content and neighboring nodes for user geolocation, which suffer the problems of: (1) position-agnostic of network representation learning, which impedes the performance of their prediction accuracy; and (2) noisy and unstable user relation fusion due to the flat graph embedding methods employed. This work presents Hierarchical Graph Neural Networks (HGNN) – a novel methodology for location-aware collaborative user-aspect data fusion and location prediction. It incorporates geographical location information of users and clustering effect of regions and can capture topological relations while preserving their relative positions. By encoding the structure and features of regions with hierarchical graph learning, HGNN can primarily alleviate the problem of noisy and unstable signal fusion. We further design a relation mechanism to bridge connections between individual users and clusters, which not only leverages the information of isolated nodes that are useless in previous methods but also captures the relations between unlabeled nodes and labeled subgraphs. Furthermore, we introduce a robust statistics method to interpret the behavior of our model by identifying the importance of data samples when predicting the locations of the users. It provides meaningful explanations on the model behaviors and outputs, overcoming the drawbacks of previous approaches that treat user geolocation as “black-box” modeling and lacking interpretability. Comprehensive evaluations on real-world Twitter datasets verify the proposed model’s superior performance and its ability to interpret the user geolocation results.     

Model-Driven Interactive System Design for Therapy Robots

Physiotherapy using intelligent robots is emerging as a new approach to recovery for many stroke patients. Although therapy robots have a strong potential in dealing with therapeutic and other medical applications, they have not been fully utilized in everyday therapy activities due to concerns over safety and the lack of friendly robot user/patient interaction models. From the viewpoint of software engineering, a user-centred design based on UML (Unified Modelling Language) has been known to be one of the best solutions to satisfy usability since the design process relies heavily on the analysis of users and their tasks to reach their goals. Therefore, a model-driven approach to interactive system design via UML for therapy robots is needed to make them usable in the real world. This paper proposes such approach and introduces a new graphical notation that describes user interface elements and the methods of connection with hardware/software objects. With the proposed abstract interaction models, prototyping interactive systems can be made faster and allows for their evaluation by users and system developers before implementation in order to improve usability from the perspectives of users and system developers.     

The quest for appropriate models of human-likeness: anthropomorphism in media equation research

Nass’ and Reeves’ media equation paradigm within human–computer interaction (HCI) challenges long-held assumptions about how users approach computers. Given a rudimentary set of cues present in the system’s design, users are said to unconsciously treat computers as genuine interactants—extending rules of politeness, biases and human interactive conventions to machines. Since the results have wide-ranging implications for HCI research methods, interface design and user experiences, researchers are hard-pressed to experimentally verify the paradigm. This paper focuses on the methodology of attributing the necessary social cues to the agent, a core aspect of the experimental design of studies dealing with the media equation. A typology of experimental anthropomorphisms is developed, allowing an assessment of how the differing axiomatic assumptions affect the relevance of the results for an evaluation of the paradigm. The paper concludes with a series of arguments in favour of one particular anthropomorphism type for researching the media equation.     

Agentsheets: a medium for creating domain-oriented visual languages

Customized visual representations enable end users to achieve their programming goals. Here, designers work with users to tailor visual programming languages to specific problem domains. We describe a design methodology and a tool for creating domain oriented, end user programming languages that effectively use visualization. We first describe a collaborative design methodology involving end users and designers. We then present Agentsheets, a tool for creating domain oriented visual programming languages, and illustrate how it supports collaborative design by examining experiences from a real language design project. Finally, we summarize the contributions of our approach and discuss its viability in industrial design projects     

Understanding flow experience from users’ requirements

This paper argues that the concept of flow can be useful in gaining a better understanding of information system users’ flow experience. This paper applies this concept in the requirements development phase of an Internet protocol television e-learning service development project. The findings show that flow experience can be visualised and measured, and that there are differences in how users see and perceive different features. Some features are driven by more experiential needs, whereas others are driven by more task-oriented goals. The findings indicate that the users’ perceived flow experiences can already be measured during the early phases of information systems (IS) development projects without having a working prototype of the IS for testing. This enables practitioners to design IS that better facilitate flow experience for the users, which in turn will potentially lead to shortened development time and cost savings for firms. This paper calls for further research in IS development and design methods that take into account the different ways of understanding user experiences, particularly their flow experiences.     

User Advocacy in Participatory Design: Designers' Experiences with a New Communication Channel

We report on participatory design activities within the PoliTeam project, a large project which introduces groupware into the German government. Working with a representative small group of users in different worksites, an existing system was adapted to user and organizational needs, with the plan to improve and expand the system to a large scale. We integrated new approaches of user advocacy and osmosis with an evolutionary cycling process. User advocates and osmosis were techniques used to explore the users' needs during actual system use. These techniques were incorporated into the system development. In this paper, we present experiences with this approach and reflect on its impact on the design process from the designers' point of view.     

一种检测兴趣漂移的图结构推荐系统

协同过滤是构造推荐系统最有效的方法之一.其中,基于图结构推荐方法成为近来协同过滤的研究热点.基于图结构的方法视用户和项为图的结点,并利用图理论去计算用户和项之间的相似度.尽管人们对图结构推荐系统开展了很多的研究和应用,然而这些研究都认为用户的兴趣是保持不变的,所以不能够根据用户兴趣的相关变化做出合理推荐.本文提出一种新的可以检测用户兴趣漂移的图结构推荐系统.首先,设计了一个新的兴趣漂移检测方法,它可以有效地检测出用户兴趣在何时发生了哪种变化.其次,根据用户的兴趣序列,对评分项进行加权并构造用户特征向量.最后,整合二部投影与随机游走进行项推荐.在标准数据集MovieLens上的测试表明算法优于两个图结构推荐方法和一个评分时间加权的协同过滤方法.     

A recent review of conventional vs. automated cybersecurity anti-phishing techniques

In the era of electronic and mobile commerce, massive numbers of financial transactions are conducted online on daily basis, which created potential fraudulent opportunities. A common fraudulent activity that involves creating a replica of a trustful website to deceive users and illegally obtain their credentials is website phishing. Website phishing is a serious online fraud, costing banks, online users, governments, and other organisations severe financial damages. One conventional approach to combat phishing is to raise awareness and educate novice users on the different tactics utilised by phishers by conducting periodic training or workshops. However, this approach has been criticised of being not cost effective as phishing tactics are constantly changing besides it may require high operational cost. Another anti-phishing approach is to legislate or amend existing cyber security laws that persecute online fraudsters without minimising its severity. A more promising anti-phishing approach is to prevent phishing attacks using intelligent machine learning (ML) technology. Using this technology, a classification system is integrated in the browser in which it will detect phishing activities and communicate these with the end user. This paper reviews and critically analyses legal, training, educational and intelligent anti-phishing approaches. More importantly, ways to combat phishing by intelligent and conventional are highlighted, besides revealing these approaches differences, similarities and positive and negative aspects from the user and performance prospective. Different stakeholders such as computer security experts, researchers in web security as well as business owners may likely benefit from this review on website phishing.     

The process of introducing information technology

This paper outlines the strategies adopted by the psychologists and ergonomists of the HUSAT Research Group to help organizations learn about information technology and systematically review and plan its organizational ramifications. An essential point is that it is not enough to understand the technology; effective implementation demands the ability to establish organizational needs and to choose a form of technology which will meet them.

The paper examines three ways of designing systems. Firstly, a technology-led approach which leads to 'fire fighting' when the negative organizational effects become apparent. A second method has tried to compensate for this by involving users in the design process. Unfortunately by the time the users have come to terms with their new task and are able to make a contribution, the system has usually been designed.

The third method of design expressly seeks to give users the time and opportunity to learn how to contribute to design, by making the design process evolutionary; i.e. by building slowly from small systems to large ones and retaining the flexibility to change. Within this concept user learning and adaptation is promoted by pilot systems, user design exercises, user support and evaluation procedures. It is only by these methods that users can be given the confidence and knowledge to exploit the potential of the new technology.     

Recommendation based on rational inferences in collaborative filtering

In collaborative filtering, the existing memory-based methods make recommendations based on the overall consistency between two users or two items. The major concerns with these methods are: (1) they are sometimes being overly confident; (2) they are prone to disregard some useful information in the user profiles; (3) they often imply some untrustworthy inferences in making a prediction. This work investigates the drawbacks of these methods, and then proposes a collaborative filtering approach based on heuristic formulated inferences. The proposed approach is based on the fact that any two users may have some common interest genres as well as different ones. Different from most existing methods, this approach introduces a more reasonable similarity measure metric, considers users’ preferences and rating patterns, and promotes rational individual prediction, thus more comprehensively measures the relevance between user and item. Experimental results from two popular public datasets show that the proposed approach improves the prediction quality significantly over several other popular methods.     

Cross-Platform Users’ Experiences Toward Designing Interusable Systems

Cross-platform services provide unified entertainment experiences across multiple devices between which users can toggle when watching content using televisions, tablets, personal computers, and smartphones. The software automatically adapts the programming to fit the diverse formats. This study analyzed user experiences (UX) of cross-platform services with a mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) approach. It used a multi-state analytical approach, in which the user model was tested in a statistical model and accompanying experiment. A variety of methods were used to best understand the complexities of UX. Heuristic results revealed the ways that UX of cross-platform services are formed, moderated, and improved, and the ways that users’ intentions are determined through the relationships among factors. The results revealed that the key elements of cross-platform UX include access, mobility, and coherence, which imply the importance of seamless UX of cross-platform services. Based on those key factors, the study proposed the idea of inter-usability for designing user-centered systems.     

Exploring casual point-and-tilt interactions for mobile geo-blogging

People record and share their experiences through text, audio and video. Increasingly they do this blogging from mobile devices. We illustrate a novel, mobile, low interaction cost approach to support the creation of a rich record of journeys made and places encountered: by pointing and tilting a mobile, users indicate their interests in a location. We built three mobile prototypes to explore the approach—the first one combines gestures and visual map feedback; the second provides a simpler visual interface; the third supports eyes-free interaction, allowing the user to simply point-and-tilt, with no visual display required. We describe two field studies undertaken to understand the value of the interaction styles afforded, then continue with a further user study to assess the interaction speed and accuracy between these interaction methods. We present the results of these studies and raise issues relevant to their design and to the wider class of devices and services concerned with mobile spatial information access.