Ulrike Pfeil

• Dr.
• University of Konstanz

Nurses who care about patients with functional disabilities are frequently required to transfer a patient from one place to another. To prevent nurses from injuring themselves during patient transfers, many government-supported schools in Germany provide programs which teach how to conduct transfers based on the kinaesthetics care conception. Howev...

Handheld Augmented Reality (AR) displays offer a see-through option to create the illusion of virtual objects being integrated into the viewer's physical environment. Some AR display technologies also allow for the deactivation of the see-through option, turning AR tablets into Virtual Reality (VR) devices that integrate the virtual objects into an...

Building data analysis skills is part of modern elementary school curricula. Recent research has explored how to facilitate children's understanding of visual data representations through completion exercises which highlight links between concrete and abstract mappings. This approach scaffolds visualization activities by presenting a target visuali...

Users' cognitive load while interacting with a system is a valuable metric for evaluations in HCI. We encourage the analysis of eye movements as an unobtrusive and widely available way to measure cognitive load. In this paper, we report initial findings from a user study with 26 participants working on three visual search tasks that represent diffe...

This special interest group addresses the status quo of HCI research with regards to research practices of transparency and openness. Specifically, it discusses whether current practices are in line with the standards applied to other fields (e.g., psychology, economics, medicine). It seeks to identify current practices that are more progressive an...

In recent years, research on cross-device interaction has become a popular topic in HCI leading to novel interaction techniques mutually interfering with new evolving theoretical paradigms. Building on previous research, we implemented an individual multi-device work environment for creative activities. In a study with 20 participants, we compared...

The method of loci is a technique to memorize large quantities of information by associating the items to be learned with familiar places (loci). The effectiveness of the technique has been well established, but the initial creation of the loci can be a tedious task. With the aim of supporting flexible learning in situ, we introduce Loci Spheres, a...

The research project ERTRAG, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, aims to develop a virtual ergonomics trainer for nursing as well as elderly care education. The trainer supports apprentices conducting the care related motions in an ergonomically correct fashion, thereby helping to prevent work-related health problems su...

People's ability to remember and recall spatial information can be harnessed to improve navigation and search performances in interactive systems. In this paper, we investigate how display size and input modality influence spatial memory, especially in relation to efficiency and user satisfaction. Based on an experiment with 28 participants, we ana...

In this position paper we encourage the use of eye tracking measurements to investigate users' cognitive load while interacting with a system. We start with an overview of how eye movements can be interpreted to provide insight about cognitive processes and present a descriptive model representing the relations of eye movements and cognitive load....

In this paper, we propose the idea of examining the effect of self-assembly on the success of mobile health persuasive technology. The IKEA effect shows that individuals evaluate products assembled by themselves more positively than pre-assembled products. The IKEA effect has been proven in several domains, e.g., in human robot interaction, where p...

This is the demo version of our workshop paper (Supporting Self-Assembly: The IKEA Effect on Mobile Health Persuasive Technology). We describe our proposal and experimental plan in this demo.

Cross-device collaboration with tablets is an increasingly popular topic in HCI. Previous work has shown that tablet-only collaboration can be improved by an additional shared workspace on an interactive tabletop. However, large tabletops are costly and need space, raising the question to what extent the physical size of shared horizontal surfaces...

Even though mobile devices are ubiquitous and users often own several of them, using them in concert to achieve a common goal is not well supported and remains a challenge for HCI. In this paper, we report on our observations of cross-device usage within groups when they engaged in a dyadic collaborative sensemaking task. Based on our findings, we...

Using affinity diagramming as an example, we investigate reality-based interfaces for supporting creative group work. Based on an observational study grounded in the reality-based interaction framework, we identified power vs. reality tradeoffs that can be addressed to find a close fit to embodied practice. Using this knowledge, we designed and imp...

Using affinity diagramming as an example, we investigate interaction techniques for supporting collaborative design activities. Based on an observational study, we identified design guidelines that need to be addressed to find a close fit to embodied practice. Using this knowledge, we designed and implemented AffinityTable, a hybrid surface for sup...

This article reports a study that investigated the occurrences of empathy in online support communities for teenagers. Qualitative content analysis with 400 messages from a discussion board about depression was used to identify how empathy was expressed in the specific online communication. Emphasis was also placed on the comparison of this age gro...

In this article, an online support community for older people is studied, with the aim of developing a taxonomy of social roles based on content analysis and social network analysis. Four hundred messages (posted between August 9, 2007, and February 5, 2008) in an online support community for older people (http://www.seniornet.org) were investigate...

In this paper we describe a system design for supporting creative group activities using distributed displays and mul- timodal interaction. We describe the rationale behind our approach and proposed interaction techniques for support- ing collaborative sketching. Our goal is to understand how the interface metaphor, display space and interaction mo...

With the increasing popularity of online support communities for people with disabilities and older people, the research domain of online communities is gaining more and more research potential in the area of inclusive design. There are many studies that investigate social interactions within online communities. However, researchers seem to apply a...

This article presents an investigation of an online support community for older people, analyzing a data-set of messages posted over the period of six years. We studied mes- sages that are related to each other which we call ‘‘message-sequences’’. We investigated the content of message-sequences and linked our findings to the level of activity of t...

We aimed to study the characteristics and usage patterns of 3D virtual worlds in the context of teaching and learning. To achieve this, we organised a full-day workshop to explore, discuss and investigate the educational use of 3D virtual worlds. Thirty participants took part in the workshop. All conversations were recorded and transcribed for anal...

In this paper, we study the social network structure of an online discussion board within SeniorNet, an empathic online community for older people. We apply Social Network Analysis (SNA) to analyse the communication patterns and relationships between members of the discussion board. In addition to looking at the structure of the exchanged messages...

We report an evaluation of a set of age-centred web design guidelines (SilverWeb guidelines) with older web users. We invited 24 older web users and used a cooperative evaluation to validate the guidelines and collect any additional problems. As a result of the experiment, 36 out of the original 37 guidelines were accepted, 1 guideline was disagree...

This paper reports an investigation of older adults’ needs and preferences concerning online social support. We focused our analysis on seven different aspects of online support: Self disclosure, Deep support, Light support, Community building, Information/Facts, Off topic, and Technical issues. For each aspect we were interested in how older adult...

The aim of this research was to investigate age differences and similarities in the use of the social networking website MySpace, to explore potential differences in social capital among older people (users over 60 years of age) compared to teenagers (users between 13 and 19 years of age). We used locally developed web crawlers to collect data from...

In this paper we describe work we have been engaged with for a number of years now in investigating Computer Mediated Communication of older people

This chapter discusses the importance of online communities for people with disabilities and the elderly. It points to a number of weaknesses of existing text based computer mediated communication (CMC) applications, but also highlights some of the key benefits of CMC for these special groups of users. The key theoretical foundations of CMC researc...

The study investigated the strengths and weaknesses of existing user-centered design (UCD) methods for eliciting requirements from older adults. A case study in which older people are involved in designing, developing, and evaluating a virtual-garden prototype. Users could potentially employ this device (which has an interface that resembles a real...

This study presents an analysis of age-related differences of user behavior in the social network site MySpace.com. We focus on two age groups: older people (60+ years of age) and teenagers (between 13 and 19 years of age). We used locally developed web crawlers to collect large sets of data from MySpace's user profile pages. We used different anal...

My PhD research aims to identify the components of social support in online support communities for older people. Findings will show how older people support each other in these online communities and how they form a social network based on their communication activities. In addition, my PhD research will reveal how different characteristics of soc...

Until a few years ago, the main activities of internet users were all about accessing information and data. These days, the internet is increasingly used for social interaction and communication purposes. This topic becomes ever more important with the growing popularity of virtual environments, social networking websites and their likes. The fact...

The goal of my PhD is to investigate how older people exchange social support in empathic online communities. This will be achieved through an in-depth investigation of online communities for older people. The results of my work will shed light on the characteristics of empathy exchanged among older people in online communities opposed to their off...

This article presents an investigation of empathy within an online community for older people (SeniorNet). Qualitative content analysis of 400 messages from a discussion board about depression was used to determine how empathy is expressed and facilitated in online communication. Special emphasis was placed on determining the components of online e...

This article explores the relationship between national culture and computer-mediated communication (CMC) in Wikipedia. The articles on the topic game from the French, German, Japanese, and Dutch Wikipedia websites were studied using content analysis methods. Correlations were investigated between patterns of contributions and the four dimensions o...

The Centre for HCI Design (HCID) at City University London has Inclusive Design as one of its key research themes. Older people have been the main research population we have been studying under this theme for a number of years now. Our work in this theme focuses primarily on the design and evaluation of web interfaces for this population. In this...

The goal of my PhD is to investigate how older people exchange social support in empathic online communities. This will be achieved through an in-depth investigation of online communities for older people. The results of my work will shed light on the characteristics of empathy exchanged among older people in online communities opposed to their off...

Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel stellt einen hybriden Ansatz zur Unterstützung kollaborativer Designtechniken vor. Die anhand der Designtechnik Affinity Diagramming beschriebenen Interaktionskonzepte werden aus einer Literaturrecherche und einer empirischen Studie abgeleitet. Diese Analyse zeigt, dass die Nutzung von Papierartefakten insbesondere in...