Empathic communication allows individuals to perceive and understand the feeling and emotion of the person with whom they are interacting. This could be particularly important during remote collaboration (such as remote assistance or distance learning) to enhance the social and emotional understanding of geographically distributed partners. However, supporting awareness in remote collaboration is very challenging especially when the interaction with the remote parties results in less information that can be communicated than in a physical interaction. We explore the effect of visualization using physiological cues that allow users to interpret emotional behaviors of remote parties with whom they are interacting in real time. The proposed visual representation allows users to infer emotional patterns from physiological cues that can potentially influence their communication approach toward a more aggressive style or maintain passive and peaceful interaction. We conducted a study involving participants who were paired up for a collaborative assessment task, interacting via voice only, videoconference, or a visual representation of the physiological measurements. Participants perceived the usage of our visual representation with higher group cohesiveness than using voice-only interaction. Further analysis shows that the visual representation significantly increases the positive affect score (i.e., participants are perceived to be more alert and demonstrate less distress) during remote collaboration. We discuss the possibilities of the proposed visual representation to support empathic communication during remote collaboration, and the benefits to the remote partners of having positive affect and group cohesiveness.

The misalignment between the timeframe of systems and that of their users can cause problems, especially when the system relies on implicit interaction. It makes it hard for users to understand what is happening and leaves them little chance to intervene. This paper introduces the design concept of slow-motion feedback, which can help to address this issue. A definition is provided, together with an overview of existing applications of this technique.

Localisation has become a standard feature in many mobile applications. Numerous techniques for both indoor and outdoor location tracking are available today, providing a diversity of ways positioning information can be delivered to a mobile application (e.g., a location-based service). Such factors as the variation of precision over time and covered areas or the difference in quality and reliability make the adoption of several techniques for one application cumbersome. This work presents an approach that models the capabilities of localisation systems and then uses this model to build a unified view on localisation, with special attention paid to uncertainty coming from different localisation conditions and its presentation to the user. We discuss technical considerations, challenges and issues of the approach and report about a user study on users' acceptance of the suggested behaviour of an application based on the approach. The results of the study showed the feasibility of the approach and revealed users' preference towards automatic but yet informed changes they experienced while using the application.

Current tools for multidisciplinary teams in user-centered software engineering (UCSE) provide little support for the different approaches of the various disciplines in the project team. Although multidisciplinary teams are getting more and more involved in UCSE projects, an efficient approach to communicate clearly and to pass results of a user needs analysis to other team members without loss of information is still missing. Based on previous experiences, we propose storyboards as a key component in such tools. Storyboards contain sketched information of users, activities, devices and the context of a future application. The comprehensible and intuitive notation and accompanying tool support presented in this paper will enhance communication and efficiency within the multidisciplinary team during UCSE projects.