Comparing Two Methods to Overcome Interaction Blindness on Public Displays Guiying Du, Lukas Lohoff, Jakub Krukar, Sergey Mukhametov Institute for Geoinformatics Münster, Germany {guiying.du|l.lohoff|krukar|
[email protected]} ABSTRACT
Nowadays overcoming interaction blindness in designing interaction methods on public displays is still a challenging task. In this work, we present our study on evaluating the effectiveness of two methods (animation and video) in overcoming people’s interaction blindness on gesture-based public displays. Our study shows that an animation-based method attracts more users, and thus possibly reduces interaction blindness compared to a video. The study also suggests the animation may persuade more users to interact but be less effective in teaching them the correct way of interaction. However further study should be made to achieve a more general conclusion. Author Keywords
Gestural interaction; interaction blindness; public displays; ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous; INTRODUCTION
With the development of interactive technologies, public displays are gradually changing from traditionally unidirectional communication manners to two-way communication facilities, allowing interaction between displays and users [2]. However, in many real world cases public displays fail to attract people and communicate their interaction ability. As Huang et al. [4] identified, people suffer from display blindness because they usually expect irrelevant commercial advertisements on displays and thus ignore them. In other situations, people may fail to notice the interactivity or do not know how to interact correctly. This is known as interaction blindness [10]. In previous work, direct cues or curiosity objects were used to help people overcome interaction blindness. QR codes [9], tweets, virtual keyboards and visual signals [5] are direct ways to indicate interactivity. “Worlds Most Useless Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for thirdparty components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). PerDis '16, June 20-22, 2016, Oulu, Finland ACM 978-1-4503-4366-4/16/06. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2914920.2940339
machine” (WMU machine), flashing iPad, pop-up notifications and visualizations of interactions [1][3][6] are typical curious objects. Researches also distinguish cues for different interaction types. For mid-air gesture, immediately showing mirrored user image or silhouette on display is a powerful cue to stimulate interaction [7]. The initial gesture is important to trigger further interaction [11]. Videos and animations are also thought as useful cues as they are culture, age and language independent, easily understandable for simple gestures, and easy to follow. However, a comparison study is missing between these two very similar methods. In our study, two research questions are raised: 1) Are there any differences for the two methods in persuading users to interact? 2) Are there any differences for the two methods in teaching users the correct way of interaction? STUDY DESGIN
A gesture-based interactive public display was deployed in the Westphalian Horse Museum, located in the Muenster Zoo. The interactive content of the display is a digital version of book "Horse memorials", and designed with consideration of “the effect of expectation”[8] to reduce the display blindness. The configuration of the study area is shown in Figure 1(a). To interact with the display, users stand in front of the public display and swipe their hands in mid-air from right to left to turn to the next page and from left to right to turn to the previous page. The study lasted for two months. We made observation 1 every weekend between 11:00 to 15:00. In the first month, the video was shown on the center of public display and the animation was used in the second month. When people stepped into study area, the display immediately showed animation or video to them. Both the animation and the video (Figure1 b, c) were displayed at the same speed with the same duration. Our group design followed the between-group design. All visitors who stepped in the study area (see Figure 1 a) were taken as our participants. The participants are categorized by two observers into three groups: Group 1: “passer-by”, people who visited the study area without any interaction, Group 2: “unsuccessful interaction”, people who tend to interact with methods other than gestures, and Group 3: “successful interaction”, people who interacted with the display with correct gestures. In order to reduce the likelihood of any bias, we observed participants during their 1 There is a possibility that the same participant visited the museum twice, but due to its low probability we decided not to control for this situation.
stay at this area and handed out questionnaires after they finished their visiting to this area.
(H2020-MSCA-ITN-2014, Grant 642332, http://www.geo-c.eu/).
Agreement
Number
REFERENCES
(a)
1.
Luke Hespanhol, Martin Tomitsch, Ian McArthur, Joel Fredericks, Ronald Schroeter, and Marcus Foth. 2015.Situated Interfaces for Engaging Citizens on the Go. Interactions. 23, 1, 40–45.
2.
Steven Houben and Christian Weichel. 2013a. Curiosity Objects: Using Curiosity to Overcome Interaction Blindness. CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts.
3.
Steven Houben and Christian Weichel. 2013b. Overcoming Interaction Blindness Through Curiosity Objects. CHI ’13 Extended Abstracts.1539–1544.
4.
Elaine M Huang, Anna Koster and Jan Borchers. 2008. Overcoming Assumptions and Uncovering Practices: When Does the Public Really Look at Public Displays? In Pervasive Computing. Springer, 228–243.
5.
Hannu Kukka, Heidi Oja, Vassilis Kostakos, Jorge Gonçalves, and Timo Ojala. 2013. What Makes You Click: Exploring Visual Signals to Entice Interaction on Public Displays. In Proc. CHI ’13. 1699–1708.
6.
Maximilian Müller, Nuno Otero, Aris Alissandrakis, and Marcelo Milrad. 2015. Increasing User Engagement with Distributed Public Displays Through the Awareness of Peer Interactions. In Proc. PerDis 2015. 23–29.
7.
Jörg Müller, Robert Walter, Gilles Bailly, Michael Nischt, Florian Alt. 2012. Looking Glass: A Field Study on Noticing Interactivity of a Shop Window. In Proc. CHI ’12.
8.
Jörg Müller, Dennis Wilmsmann, Juliane Exeler, Markus Buzeck, Albrecht Schmidt, Tim Jay, Antonio Krüger.2009. Display Blindness: The Effect of Expectations on Attention towards Digital Signage. In Pervasive Computing (pp. 1-8). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
9.
Morin Ostkamp, Sven Heitmann, and Christian Kray. 2015. Short-range Optical Interaction Between Smartphones and Public Displays. In Proc. PerDis 2015. 39–46.
(c)
(b)
Figure 1. Study area (a), animation (b), and video (c) RESULT
During the study, a total of 203 participants were observed and 29 (17%) agreed to fill in a questionnaire about their knowledge on gesture-based interaction and their familiarity with similar technologies. The statistics are shown in Table 1. However the questionnaire does not show any significant connection with the study. Method
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Total
Animation
71
8
16
95
Video
93
1
14
108
Total
164
9
30
203
Table 1. Absolute number of participants per group
We observed that the animation we used attracted more user interactions than the video, which means the animation method reduced interaction blindness more effectively compared to the video (Chi-square test, χ²(2, N = 203) = 7.73; p = 0.02). We proposed that perceptual level, i.e. the ability of presenting oneself in an attractive and distinguishable manner from the surrounding, is a possible reason. This suggests our design of the animation maybe easier to be noticed and distinguished from the surrounding than the video. We also noticed that the animation caused a larger proportion of incorrect interactions. This means the animation we used is easier for people to understand compared to the video. It also suggests cognitive level, i.e. the ability of being easily understand, should also be considered when design the cues. CONCLUSION
The study suggests that the animation in our study attracts more interactions, and possibly reduces interaction blindness compared to the video. The video seems to have a better educational effect in teaching people to perform correct interaction. Our study highlights two phases in overcoming interaction blindness: 1) raising the awareness of interactivity of public displays, 2) educating people to perform the correct interaction. Any failure in the two phases may cause no interaction or unsuccessful interaction. Stemmed from this initial work, the further comparison between animations and videos can be made from the perceptual level and cognitive level. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank Chris Kray for his valuable feedback. We also thank the Westphalian Horse Museum for their support during the study. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Commission through the GEO-C project
10. Salvatore Sorce, Alessio Malizia, Vito Gentile, and Antonio Gentile .2015. Touchless Gestural Interfaces for Networked Public Displays: Overcoming Interaction Blindness and Performing Evaluations In-the-wild. In Adj. Proc. Ubicomp 2015 and Proc. ISWC 2015. 789–790. 11. Robert Walter, Gilles Bailly, Jörg Müller. 2013. StrikeAPose: Revealing Mid-Air Gestures on Public Displays. In Proc. CHI ’13.
