An (Un)Necessary Evil - Users’ (Un)Certainty about Smartphone App Permissions and Implications for Privacy Engineering

in 2022 7th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroSPW) (in press)

App permission requests are a control mechanism meant to help users oversee and safeguard access to data and resources on their smartphones. To decide whether to accept or deny such requests and make this ... [more ▼]

App permission requests are a control mechanism meant to help users oversee and safeguard access to data and resources on their smartphones. To decide whether to accept or deny such requests and make this consent valid, users need to understand the underlying reasons and judge the relevance of disclosing data in line with their own use of an app. This study investigates people’s certainty about app permission requests via an online survey with 400 representative participants of the UK population. The results demonstrate that users are uncertain about the necessity of granting app permissions for about half of the tested permission requests. This implies substantial privacy risks, which are discussed in the paper, resulting in a call for user-protecting interventions by privacy engineers. [less ▲]

Eliciting Meaningful Collaboration Metrics: Design Implications for Self-Tracking Technologies at Work

in Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2023 (2023)

As the workplace collaboration software market is booming, there is an opportunity to design tools to support reflection and self-regulation of collaboration practices. Building on approaches from ... [more ▼]

As the workplace collaboration software market is booming, there is an opportunity to design tools to support reflection and self-regulation of collaboration practices. Building on approaches from personal informatics (PI), we aim to understand and promote the use of data to enable employees to explore their work practices, specifically collaboration. Focused on the preparation stage of PI (deciding to track and tools selection), we invited office workers (N=15, knowledge workers in academia) to identify meaningful aspects of their collaboration experience and report them in a logbook for two weeks. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with participants to identify and reflect on metrics related to collaboration experience. We contribute new insights into employees’ motivations and envisioned metrics reflecting their collaboration, including the personal, social, and organizational considerations for collecting and sharing this data. We derive design implications for self-tracking technologies for collaboration. [less ▲]

"Do we need an entire course about it?": Evaluating two years of teaching HCI in computer science

Scientific Conference (2022, May 01)

Educators increasingly agree on the importance of teaching Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to Computer Science (CS) students, but there is debate on how to best integrate HCI into CS curricula ... [more ▼]

Educators increasingly agree on the importance of teaching Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to Computer Science (CS) students, but there is debate on how to best integrate HCI into CS curricula. Unfortunately, standard course evaluations typically do not provide sufficient insights for improving HCI classes. In the present article, we used a human-centered design approach to evaluate our HCI classes, building on a qualitative study with CS students from four introductory HCI classes over two years. We report on a qualitative assessment through interviews, photo elicitation and sentence completion. Specifically, we addressed four research questions: which contents were the most relevant, how students experienced the courses, how they view the role of HCI in CS, and which outcomes they perceived from the HCI courses. We gathered rich qualitative insights beyond the standard course evaluations and derived concrete enhancements for future course iterations. We discuss implications for other HCI educators and contribute recommendations for the living HCI curriculum. Furthermore, we reflect on the usefulness of our methodological approach to collect in-depth constructive feedback from students. [less ▲]

Empathy in Design Scale: Development and Initial Insights

in Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2022, April)

Empathy towards users is crucial to the design of user-centered technologies and services. Previous research focused on defining empathy and its role in the design process for triggering empathy for end ... [more ▼]

Empathy towards users is crucial to the design of user-centered technologies and services. Previous research focused on defining empathy and its role in the design process for triggering empathy for end-users. However, there is a lack of empathy measurement instruments in design. Most previous work focused on designers, overlooking the need for other stakeholders to develop empathy towards the users to break organizational silos and deliver high-quality user-centered services and products. In this contribution, we share the preliminary stages of the development of an empathy scale for service design. We build on empathy literature from psychology and design to define 18 items representing four empathy dimensions. We report on the definition of these dimensions and their underlying items, and present preliminary studies in which we reviewed the first version of the scale with experts and stakeholders. [less ▲]

Co-concevoir des outils d’évaluation : Impliquer les utilisateurs pour une meilleure expérience. Retour sur la collaboration avec des enseignants pour développer l’outil d’évaluation en ligne OASYS4schools.

Scientific Conference (2021, March 30)

"I am definitely manipulated, even when I am aware of it. It’s ridiculous!" - Dark Patterns from the End-User Perspective

in Proceedings of ACM DIS Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (2021)

Online services pervasively employ manipulative designs (i.e., dark patterns) to influence users to purchase goods and subscriptions, spend more time on-site, or mindlessly accept the harvesting of their ... [more ▼]

Online services pervasively employ manipulative designs (i.e., dark patterns) to influence users to purchase goods and subscriptions, spend more time on-site, or mindlessly accept the harvesting of their personal data. To protect users from the lure of such designs, we asked: are users aware of the presence of dark patterns? If so, are they able to resist them? By surveying 406 individuals, we found that they are generally aware of the influence that manipulative designs can exert on their online behaviour. However, being aware does not equip users with the ability to oppose such influence. We further find that respondents, especially younger ones, often recognise the "darkness" of certain designs, but remain unsure of the actual harm they may suffer. Finally, we discuss a set of interventions (e.g., bright patterns, design frictions, training games, applications to expedite legal enforcement) in the light of our findings. [less ▲]

Dark Patterns: Deception or Simply Bad Design?

Poster (2019)

Lately, researchers, journalists, and regulators are devoting attention to dark patterns, defined as "design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering or deceiving users into making ... [more ▼]

Lately, researchers, journalists, and regulators are devoting attention to dark patterns, defined as "design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering or deceiving users into making decisions that, if fully informed and capable of selecting alternatives, they would not make". Those patterns that have the purpose" or the "substantial effect of obscuring, subverting, or impairing user autonomy, decision-making, or choice" have also been qualified as dark. These definitions are dense: they contain concepts like coercion, nudging, and deception that all alone would deserve an entire work to be discussed. [less ▲]