Jean-bernard Martens

Eindhoven University of Technology | TUE · Department of Industrial Design

While the applied psychology community relies on statistics to assist drawing conclusions from quantitative data, the methods being used mostly today do not reflect several of the advances in statistics that have been realized over the past decades. We show in this paper how a number of issues with how statistical analyses are presently executed an...

Industrial design students generally have difficulty in making good design pitching to convincing the audiences to subscribe a design concept. Despite the values of stories for design communication have been greatly proposed by literature, in students’ practices there is usually no story or no complete story in their pitching. As what often been co...

Several methods and tools have been developed to support storytelling used in design. While the benefits of storytelling have been argued extensively in literature, the willingness to adopt it in actual practice, especially in students’ design projects, has however been slow. The lack of empirical studies on actual adoption of storytelling calls fo...

The design profession is shifting from designing objects towards designing for experiences, and the main premise of this paper is that designers need strategic guidance in bringing the emotional, contextual, and temporal aspects of experiences into discussion. Existing externalization strategies are not obviously equipped to help incorporate the tr...

Designing for experience requires designers to pay attention to reflection on design impact. However, industrial design students are observed to have difficulty in demonstrating the impact of their design concepts due to insufficient thinking and reflection on design impact. There is a lack in the literature on both reflections on design impact and...

In a CHI paper from 10 years ago, entitled "Accounting for Diversity in Subjective Judgments", an interesting dichotomy was reported between, on the one side, the increased use of idiosyncratic constructs when judging the user experience of diverse products and, on the other hand, the statistical methods available to analyze such data. The paper mo...

It is not unusual for empirical scientists, who are often not specialists in statistics, to have only limited trust in the statistical analyses that they apply to their data. The claim of this course is that an improved human-computer interaction with statistical methods can be accomplished by providing a simple mental model of what statistics does...

Value has been one of the topics in HCI and design field with various definitions from perspectives. Values are in essence related to experience because they are personal perception and assessment on objects, products, or services. Hence, it makes sense to involve values in user experience design and make values as one of the design goals. However,...

User experience design requires communication to share design information and to integrate specialised knowledge to optimise design performance. Personal experience during communication process will influence individual participation, the output of communication and design performance. Defined by absorption into stories, narrative transportation wi...

Interaction systems with complex sensors are often required to operate in a social context, and hence need to respect social rules of engagement. We propose that reasoning about such systems, and designing them, can be supported by the mirrored-perception-cognition-action model that we introduce in this paper. We illustrate the model and the associ...

Agile development requires a highly iterative and collaborative design process, which relies on the successful interpretation of software development activities amongst team members throughout the overall process. However, contemporary methods and tools that support agile efforts provide little help in addressing context-specific tacit knowledge, w...

Understanding big and complex scientific data is still an immature topic. It involves studying visualization methods to faithfully represent data, on the one hand, and designing interfaces that truly assist users with data analysis, on the other hand. In an earlier study, we developed guidelines for choosing display environment for four specific, b...

Storytelling has been known as a service design method and been used broadly not only in service design but also in the context of user experience design. However, practitioners cannot yet fully appreciate the benefits of storytelling, and often confuse storytelling with storyboarding and scenarios. The digital storytelling emerged in recent years...

Contemporary creative design practice draws from the fields of product design and user-centered design, as boundaries between these two traditions become blurred as design thinking is embraced by industry and academia. By early design we mean design activities taking place with the formulation of an initial design challenge all the way through to t...

The role of design shifts from designing objects towards designing for experiences. The design profession has to follow this trend but the current skill-set of designers focuses mainly on objects; their form, function, manufacturing and interaction. However, contemporary methods and tools that support the designers’ creative efforts provide little...

Creating animations is a complex activity that often requires an expert, especially if results need to be obtained under time pressure. As animations are potentially relevant in many different contexts, it is interesting to allow more people to use them for communicating ideas about time-varying phenomena. Multi-touch devices create opportunities t...

Human performance in selection tasks is frequently described by Fitts' law, which states that the average time needed to move to a target and select it is linearly related to the index of difficulty for the task, which is the logarithm of the task characteristic C=A/W, where A is the target distance and W is the target width. The coefficients in th...

This book presents a number of new methods, tools, and approaches aimed to assist researchers and designers during the early stages of the design process, focusing on the need to approach the development of new interactive products, systems and related services by closely observing the needs of potential end-users through adopting a design thinking...

doi: 10.1080/02687038.2015.1109051

In this article, we describe the iterative design and field trial of Amail, an email client specifically designed for people with aphasia who have problems expressing themselves verbally. We conducted a 3-month study with eight persons with aphasia to better understand how people with aphasia could integrate Amail in their daily life. Subjective da...

The aim of this study was to validate the stability of the different factors of the Multidimensional Driving Style Inventory (MDSI) [16], which was originally developed and validated with participants in different geographical areas of Israel. In this study, the questionnaire was distributed in the Netherlands and Belgium. A factor analysis of the...

Posture monitoring and correction technologies can support prevention and treatment of spinal pain or can help detect and avoid compensatory movements during the neurological rehabilitation of upper extremities, which can be very important to ensure their effectiveness. We describe the design and development of Smart Rehabilitation Garment (SRG) a...

Increasingly, 'app-store' releases of software are used as a vehicle for large-scale user trials 'in the wild'. Several opportunities and methodological challenges arise from having little or no access to users, other than through the application itself. So far, researchers have needed to hardcode survey items into the software application studied,...

Creative processes involve a repertoire of digital devices ranging from mobile phones over tablets and desktop computers to electronic whiteboards and wall-sized displays. While some integration across multiple devices is supported more sophisticated kinds of integration that connect devices and amplify their potential are limited. Many creative pr...

A recent trend in technological innovation is towards the developmentof increasingly multifunctional and complex products to be used within rich socio-cultural contexts such asthe high-endoffice,the digitalhome,andprofessionalor personalhealthcare. One important consequence of the development of strongly innovative products is a growing market unce...

Progress in empirical research relies on adequate statistical analysis and reporting. This article proposes an alternative approach to statistical modeling that is based on an old but mostly forgotten idea, namely Thurstone modeling. Traditional statistical methods assume that either the measured data, in the case of parametric statistics, or the r...

The research presented in this paper aims at increasing our understanding of how tools to rapidly create and manipulate animations can influence the design process in a positive way. We are especially interested in creative activities that are conducted in groups. We present a case study where a tool for sketching animations was introduced in a gam...

Demo Hour highlights new prototypes and projects that exemplify innovation and novel forms of interaction. Audrey Desjardins, Editor

In this paper, we describe the iterative design and exploratory evaluation of ‘Amail’, an email tool designed for persons with aphasia. It is inspired by interviews with persons with aphasia and their partners and has been improved through discussions with experienced speech therapists. Our user studies show that aphasics find current email communi...

This paper describes a context mapping study that was conducted with designers from three companies to elicit design design-relevant insights into systems that can more optimally support co-located design collaboration. The study aim is to better understand the current and envisioned way of working of design professionals. The main results are a se...

We present iScale, a survey tool for the retrospective elicitation of longitudinal user experience data. iScale aims to minimize retrospection bias and employs graphing to impose a process during the reconstruction of one's experiences. Two versions, the constructive and the value-accountiScale, were motivated by two distinct theories on how people...

This demonstration presents idAnimate, a multi-touch application for sketching animations. Thanks to the affordances provided by multitouch interfaces, idAnimate yields a novel, intuitive and easy to use animation technique named transformation-by-example, that allows users to author animations in minimal time. This is achieved by transforming obje...

While statistics is recognized as an important topic in the area of human-computer interaction (HCI) and other scientific fields, it is also a topic that spurns continuous debate. The current practice is that, despite extensive developments in the area of statistics in the last decades, most practitioners stick to the most simple parametric methods...

Design is changing into an experience-oriented discipline and therefore designers need appropriate tools and methods to incorporate experiential aspects into their designs. We argue that the creative skills required of designers are starting to overlap with those required of professional storytellers. Understanding the structural strategies behind...

Many studies have investigated ways to leverage communication with people with aphasia. Here, a new concept is developed for people with non-severe aphasia in a way that accesses the emotional and unaware layer of a conversation and then communicates certain information to the partner hence; introducing new dynamics and structure to a conversation....

In this paper we present the design of an application that supports conversational storytelling for people with aphasia. Camelendar is a touch screen application that supports people with aphasia in expressive storytelling. Camelendar utilizes photos to support people with aphasia talking about their daily activities; participants of the conversati...

Recent discussions in the interaction design community have called attention to sketching as an omnipresent element of any disciplined activity of design, and have pointed out that sketching should be extended beyond the simple creation of a pencil trace on paper. More specifically, the need to deal with all attributes of a user experience, especia...

The law of path steering, as proposed by Accot and Zhai, describes a quantitative relationship between human temporal performance and the path's spatial characteristics. The steering law is formulated as a continuous goal crossing task, in which a large number of goals are crossed along the path. The steering law has been verified empirically for l...

An email program has been developed by the Aphasia Union Netherlands (AVN) to enhance communication between aphasics mutually and with their therapists. In this paper we report intermediate evaluation results of the AVN email program. We evaluated the email program in two ways: a. by analyzing the AVN email server logs and b. by collecting subjecti...

Design is changing into an experience-oriented discipline; consequently designers need appropriate tools and methods to incorporate experiential aspects into their designs. A story is a crafted experience and storytelling is the craft. Therefore, understanding the structural strategies behind storytelling and learning how to incorporate them into a...

Augmented games, aim at promoting social interaction between participating players, as this is considered a major characteristic of any good multi-player game. In this paper, we discuss two related case studies where we investigated various options for enhancing the gaming experience through augmented tabletop games for children and older adults. L...

A wealth of studies in the field of user experience have tried to conceptualize new measures of product quality and inquire into how the overall goodness of a product is formed on the basis of product quality perceptions. An interesting question relates to how the perception as well as the relative dominance of different product qualities evolve ac...

In this paper we present the design of an application that helps people with expressive aphasia to express their feelings and share information through digital photographs. Our design is based on feedback from the therapist and persons with aphasia and their partners. The preliminary prototypes are evaluated with persons with aphasia and their part...

An alternative paradigm to longitudinal studies of user experience is proposed. We illustrate this paradigm through a number of recent tool-based methods. We conclude by raising a number of challenges that we need to address in order to establish this paradigm as a fruitful alternative to longitudinal studies.

In this paper we present some preliminary outcomes concerning the design of an email communication tool for persons with expressive aphasia. The purpose of our design is to make email accessible for aphasics. It is based on interviews with persons with aphasia and their partners and has been verified with a speech therapist. Our user studies confir...

Symbols are used in scatterplots to encode data in a way that is appropriate for perception through human visual channels. Color is believed to be the most dominant channel with lightness regarded as the most important one of three color dimensions. We study lightness perception in scatterplots in the context of analytic tasks requiring symbol disc...

Scatterplots and parallel coordinate plots can both be used to find correlation visually [2][3][4]. In this paper, we compare these two visualization methods in two user studies. In the first study, 25 participants indicated the correlation they observed in plots with varying correlation of sample data, sample size, and timing condition. In the sec...

The law of path steering, as proposed by Accot and Zhai, describes a quantitative relationship between human temporal performance and the path's spatial characteristics. The steering law is formulated as a continuous goal crossing task, in which a large number of goals are crossed along the path. The steering law has been verified empirically for l...

People have always relied on visual tools such as maps, charts and diagrams to better understand problems and solve them in less time. Continuous improvements in computer processing power and graphics capabilities have made it possible to incorporate a wide range of advanced visualization techniques in most computing application domains, including...

Traditional desktop computers are known to offer insufficient functionality to designers. They are often complemented by pen-based tablet devices in order to better support key activities such as sketching and modeling. However, even such extended systems are restricted, as they insufficiently support other key activities of individual designers an...

In this paper we describe the design and exploratory field evaluation of an experience tagging and sharing application for people with expressive aphasia. We conducted a probe study with representatives from this target user group to gain a deeper understanding of the potential use of technology to capture and share everyday experiences. We used th...

In this paper we present the design of an image capturing device for persons with aphasia. The early concepts were validated with one speech therapist and the usability of the camera was tested with one aphasic person. Our semi-autonomous hand-held camera, tapered to meet specific interaction and ergonomic needs of expressive aphasics. This camera...

Some recent discussions in the interaction design community have called attention to sketching as an omnipresent element of any disciplined activity of design, and have pointed out that sketching should be extended beyond the simple creation of a pencil trace on paper. More specifically the need to deal with all attributes of a user experience, esp...

The current paper proposes a novel method of analyzing goal-directed movements by dividing them into distinct movement intervals. We demonstrate how the description of the first and second most prominent movement intervals in terms of duration and length can provide insight into the applied movement strategies under different conditions. This metho...

Symbols are used in scatterplots to encode data in a way that is appropriate for perception through human visual channels. Symbol size is believed to be the second dominant channel after color. We study symbol size perception in scatterplots in the context of analytic tasks requiring size discrimination. More specifically, we performed an experimen...

Much of our social life consists of sharing daily stories with other people. However, sharing personal stories can be extremely difficult for people with limited verbal ability, such as those suffering from expressive aphasia. Aphasia is an acquired communication disorder that is caused by brain injury or trauma. Aphasia affects language comprehens...

We present iScale, a survey tool for the retrospective elicitation of longitudinal user experience data. iScale employs sketching in imposing a process in the reconstruction of one's experiences with the aim to minimize retrospection bias. Two versions, the Constructive and the Value-Account iScale, were motivated by two distinct theories on how pe...

Existing measures for evaluating user performance on interaction tasks in virtual environments don't often provide sufficient information for improving these interactions. A new method for analyzing 3D goal-directed movements divides them into meaningful phases. The authors applied this method to experimental data collected for a 3D task resembling...

This chapter intends to clarify how statistical models can be used in the interactive analysis of experimental data. It is discussed how maximum likelihood estimation can map experimental data into model parameters, and how confidence intervals on these parameters play a key role in drawing inferences. One frequent inference is whether or not simil...

User experience (UX) evaluation is gaining increased interest lately, both from academia and industry. In this paper we argue that UX evaluation needs to fulfill two important requirements: scalability, i.e. the ability to provide useful feedback in different stages of the design, and diversity, i.e. the ability to reflect the di-versity of opinion...

Various methods and measures have been developed to assess the quality of input devices and interaction techniques. One approach to investigating the performance of input devices and interaction techniques is to focus on the quality of the produced movements. The current paper proposes a new method of analyzing goal-directed movements by dividing t...

The measures that are currently used to evaluate users' performances on interaction tasks in virtual environments often do not provide sufficient information for how to improve these interactions. The current paper proposes a new method for analyzing 3D goal-directed movements based on dividing them into meaningful phases. We apply the method to ex...

In this paper we argue against averaging as a common practice in the analysis of subjective attribute judgments, both across and within subjects. Previous work has raised awareness of the diversity between individuals' perceptions. In this paper it will furthermore become apparent that such diversity can also exist within a single individual, in th...

This paper describes an interactive application that aims to support the rehabilitation of handwriting skills in people that suffer from paralysis after a stroke. The purpose of the application is to make the rehabilitation of handwriting skills fun and engaging. Four platform-independent games with adjustable levels of difficulty were created in o...

Symbols are frequently used to represent data objects in visualization. An appropriate contrast between symbols is a precondition that determines the efficiency of a visual analysis process. We study the contrast between different types of symbols in the context of scatterplots, based on user testing and a quantitative model for symbol contrast. In...

The study of aimed movements has a long history, starting at least as far back as 1899 when Wood-worth proposed a two-component model in which aimed movements are broken into an initial ballistic phase and an additional control phase. In this paper, we use Wood-worth's model for experimentally comparing aimed movements in the real world with those...

A recent trend in technological innovation is towards the development of increasingly multifunctional and complex products to be used within rich socio-cultural contexts such as the high-end office, the digital home, and professional or personal healthcare. One important consequence of the development of strongly innovative products is a growing ma...

In this paper we introduce an interactive wall-mounted display tool that supports conveying the intended message or ideas in asynchronous presentations. The tool allows to easily record presentations while capturing the richness of the presenter's individual presentation skills and style. The tool records the presentation and organizes it into thre...

A recent trend in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research addresses human needs that go beyond the instrumental, resulting in an increasing body of knowledge about how users form overall evaluative judgments on the quality of interactive products. An aspect largely neglected so far is that of temporality, i.e. how the quality of users' experience...

The way we experience and evaluate interactive products develops over time. An exploratory study aimed at understanding how users form evaluative judgments during the first experiences with a product as well as after four weeks of use. Goodness, an evaluative judgment related to the overall satisfaction with the product, was largely formed on the b...

Physical controls are now ubiquitous in everyday interactions. Empirical studies of physical interactions have traditionally been exploring instrumental aspects such as error rate and experienced workload. Recently, affective aspects of physical interaction have attracted an increased interest. In this paper we further argue that physical controls...

In our studies aimed at understanding design practice we have identified the creation of mood boards as a relevant task for designers. In this paper we introduce an interactive wall-mounted display system that supports the presentation of mood boards. The system allows designers to easily record their mood board presentations while capturing the ri...

In this paper, we report on the design and evaluation of a tabletop game especially created for senior citizens. The game is intended to provide leisure and fun and is played with four players on an augmented tabletop. It evolved from existing games and rules that are popular and familiar amongst senior citizens. Several aspects that are part of th...

We present the design of a system for Aphasics that assist them in storytelling. Storytelling, in the sense of being able to relate recent and past experiences to relevant others, is considered to be crucial for the quality of life and psychological wellbeing of most people. The storytelling support system that we propose is primarily intended to b...

In this paper, we describe two projects aimed at designing a tool for documenting and reporting everyday experiences by aphasics. Proxy feedback on design concepts was used to select concepts for further in-depth prototyping. Both final prototypes use automated image capturing and provide a means for browsing the collected images. One design is mob...

A plethora of reaching techniques, intended for moving objects between locations distant to the user, have recently been proposed and tested. One of the most promising techniques is the Radar View. Up till now, the focus has been mostly on how a user can interact efficiently with a given radar map, not on how these maps are created and maintained....

Three-dimensional (3D) interaction with scientific data is still an immature topic. It involves studying visualization methods to faithfully represent data, on the one hand, and designing interfaces that truly assist users in the data analysis process, on the other hand. In this chapter, we study how the human computer interface influences performa...