Interactions with computing systems and conversational services such as ChatGPT have become an inherent part of our daily lives. It is surprising that user interfaces, the gateways through which we communicate with an interactive intelligent system, are still predominantly devoid from hedonic aspects. There is little attempt to make communication through user interfaces intentionally more like communication with humans. Anthropomorphic user interfaces can transform interactions with intelligent software into more pleasant experiences by integrating human-like attributes. Anthropomorphic user interfaces expose human-like attributes that enable people to perceive, connect and interact with the interfaces as social actors. This integration of human-like aspects not only enhances user experience but also holds the potential to make interfaces more sustainable, as they rely on familiar human interaction patterns, thus potentially reducing the learning curve and increasing user adoption rates. However, there is little consensus on how to build these anthropomorphic user interfaces. We conducted an extensive literature review on existing anthropomorphic user interfaces for software systems (past), in order to map and connect existing definitions and interpretations in an overarching taxonomy (present). The taxonomy is used to organize and structure examples of anthropomorphic user interfaces into an accessible collection. The taxonomy and an accompanying web tool provides designers with a reference framework for analyzing and dissecting existing anthropomorphic user interfaces, and for designing new anthropomorphic user interfaces (future).

The number of wearable devices that we carry increases, with smaller companion devices like smartwatches providing quick access for simple tasks. These devices are, however, not necessarily in direct sight of the user and during everyday activities, it is unlikely, even undesirable, that the user constantly focuses on or interacts with these screens. Furthermore, interaction is often limited because our hands are occupied carrying or holding items such as bags, papers, boxes, or tools. In this paper, we evaluate how encumbrance affects, among others, the time it takes to perceive and react to a notification depending on the placement of the companion device. Our experimental results can assist designers in choosing the right device for the task.

Storyboards are used in user-centred design (UCD) to clarify a scenario that describes the future use of a system. Although there are many styles of storyboarding, the graphical notation and language are very accessible for all team members of a multidisciplinary team. This papers describes how principles and techniques from comics can facilitate storyboarding in our COMuICSer approach and tool. COMuICSer formalises the way that storyboards are created, while preserving creative aspects of storyboarding. In combination with tool support for COMuICSer, this simplifies the relation of storyboards with other artefacts created in UCD such as structured models and UI designs and supports communication in multidisciplinary teams.

In Western society, the elderly represent a rapidly growing demographic group. For this group, dementia has become an important cause of dependencies on others and causes difficulties with independent living. Typical symptoms of the dementia syndrome are decreased location awareness and difficulties in situating ones activities in time, thus hindering long term plans and activities. We present our approach in creating an interactive system tailored for the needs of the early phases of the dementia syndrome. Given the increasing literacy with mobile technologies in this group, we propose an approach that exploits mobile technology in combination with the physical and social context to support prolonged independent living. Our system strengthens the involvement of caregivers through the patient's social network. We show that applications for people suffering from dementia can be created by explicitly taking into account context in the design process. Context dependencies that are defined in an early stage in the development process are propagated as part of the runtime behavior of the interactive system.

Multi-touch large display interfaces are becoming increasingly popular in public spaces. These spaces impose specific requirements on the accessibility of the user interfaces: most users are not familiar with the interface and expectations with regard to user experience are very high. Multi-touch interaction beyond the traditional move-rotate-scale interactions is often unknown to the public and can become exceedingly complex. We introduce TouchGhosts: visual guides that are embedded in the multi-touch user interface and that demonstrate the available interactions to the user. TouchGhosts are activated while using an interface, providing guidance on the fly and within the context-of-use. Our approach allows to define reconfigurable strategies to decide how or when a TouchGhost should be activated and which particular visualization will be presented to the user.

The diversity of end-user devices in combination with a growing user base poses important challenges for providing easy access to the huge amount of content and services currently available. Each device has its typical set of capabilities and characteristics that must be taken into account to create an appropriate user interface that provides interactive access to multimedia data and services. Furthermore, end-users also have their specific requirements that influence the accessibility of data and services for individual access. The approach we present in this paper is geared towards the idea of universal access to interactive multimedia data and services for everyone, independent of the user characteristics or end-user device capabilities. For this purpose we combine user and device models with high-level user interface description languages in order to decouple the interface presentation from its platform, and to generate the most suitable interface on a per-user, per- device basis making use of the semantics that are provided by user and device profile.

The Block Excemption Regulation of the European Commission was enacted in 2002 with the goal to strengthen competition between dependent and independent repairers in the automotive after-sales market. The FP6 MYCAREVENT project embraces these goals while triggering new business opportunities by establishing a mobile accessible infrastructure as single gateway to different kinds of resources. This information procurement framework allows customers to find specific vehicle repair and diagnostic data from different car manufacturers and 3rd parties in the same way. In order to provide a higher degree of accessibility, extensibil- ity and adaptivity, our service-oriented infrastructure presented in this paper is web-based and consists of three main components: Mobile Clients, Service Portal and Remote Services. New communication and multimedia technologies are invoked to improve interoperability, usability and maintenance of the underlying Mobile Service World. In this paper we focus on the architecture of our highly flexible procurement infrastructure. Standardized elements and methodologies ensure an integrated solution and enable easy expandability with new content, services and components.