AI Will Be a Thing in Design and Research, but There Are Some Issues to Resolve First

To what extent do digital designers and user researchers in industry make use of AI-powered systems to support their work? The answer seems to be “not much,” as we found in a survey with 34 practitioners. In general, there seems to be little awareness of the specific advantages AI can bring to a design process and which tools are already out there, despite significant issues with existing processes that could be well mitigated with the help of AI. However, designers and researchers are very open to the topic and would appreciate AI-powered systems to support them in both ideation and evaluation. Providing practitioners with such systems that are easily accessible and demonstrate added value holds great opportunities.

There is such a thing as too much data

Tales of Design & User Experience (ToDUX) #4 ⁂ Dear readers and friends, I hope you’re all doing good. 😊 I have a two new pieces, both of which have been published in the UX Collective. The first one—“Listen to users, but only 85% of the time”—investigates why it’s not in the best interest of… Continue reading There is such a thing as too much data

Creating Medium-Fidelity Prototypes for AR/VR Experiences

Prototyping in 3D isn't the same as in just two dimensions. Compared to regular, flat websites, augmented and virtual reality have very different requirements when it comes to creating prototypes. To close a gap in the medium-fidelity range of AR/VR prototyping methods, we've created 360theater, which makes use of dioramas and 360° content for creating physical-digital prototypes. We've used our new method in workshops with design students and found that it comes close to the final experience while complementing other methods with different levels of fidelity.

REFOCUS: Current & Future Search Interface Requirements for German-speaking Users

When looking at current research, there is plenty of existing work inquiring into how users use search engines1 and how future search interfaces could look like2. Yet, an investigation of users' perceptions of and expectations towards current and future search interfaces is still missing. Therefore, at this year's International Conference on WWW/Internet (ICWI '16) my co-author Martin Gaedke… Continue reading REFOCUS: Current & Future Search Interface Requirements for German-speaking Users

Enabling Industry 4.0 with HoloBuilder

At this year's INFORMATIK conference held by the GI in Cottbus, I had the chance to present a research paper (full text here) about HoloBuilder—officially titled "Enabling Industry 4.0 with holobuilder"1—that I wrote together with my colleagues Kristina Tenhaft, Simon Heinen and Harry Handorf. In our paper, we examine HoloBuilder from a research rather than… Continue reading Enabling Industry 4.0 with HoloBuilder

INUIT: The Interface Usability Instrument

As one of the building blocks of my PhD thesis, I have developed a novel instrument for measuring the usability of web interfaces, which is simply called Inuit—the Interface Usability Instrument1. This was necessary because a usability instrument that is suited for the automatic methods for Search Interaction Optimization I have developed in my PhD… Continue reading INUIT: The Interface Usability Instrument

S.O.S. Receives Best Paper Honarable Mention Award at CHI ’15

Our paper "S.O.S.: Does Your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Need Help?"—co-authors are Dr. Andreas Both (Unister) and Prof. Martin Gaedke (TU Chemnitz)—has been awarded a Best Paper Honarable Mention Award by ACM SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction of the Association for Computing Machinery. According to Wikipedia, ACM SIGCHI is "the world's leading organization in… Continue reading S.O.S. Receives Best Paper Honarable Mention Award at CHI ’15

ICYMI: This is a motherfucking website and I wrote a motherfucking conference article about it

(Disclaimer: motherfuckingwebsite.com was not made by me!) The post in which I review motherfuckingwebsite.com and propose some changes to make it even more perfect (see here) is the most widely read post on my blog by far. To date, it has received 8,715 views, with the front page of my blog being in second place having… Continue reading ICYMI: This is a motherfucking website and I wrote a motherfucking conference article about it