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Games have always been popular for connecting people, from local single-player and couch co-op, to massively multiplayer online. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, remote games that involved and fostered social interactions and connections were a highlight among strategies for staying connected. For this year's games and play SIG, we come together to discuss the relevant and timely topic of social and playful technologies, and how they can be designed to best foster meaningful social connections over a distance. We bring together attendees from not only the games community, but also those in the broader field of CHI focusing on social and playful technologies. © 2023 Owner/Author.
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Purpose: Anchored with turbulence emanating from the COVID-19 pandemic, the work environment has become more stressful with debilitating effects on the well-being of employees. Employees rely on varying means of coping including drug abuse. However, the association between drug abuse and suicidal thoughts among employees in Ghana is unknown. Therefore, this study sought to examine the relationship between drug abuse and suicidal thoughts among employees in Ghana. Design/methodology/approach: In a cross-sectional survey, this study purposively sampled 470 employees from three sectors of the Ghanaian economy (telecommunication, banking and manufacturing). The data was analysed using the multivariate analysis (MANOVA), Pearson's r test and hierarchical regression. Findings: Analysis of data revealed a positive relationship between drug abuse and suicidal thoughts, indicating that drug abuse is a risk factor for suicidal thoughts. Besides, it was also revealed that banking sector employees have a higher risk of having suicidal thoughts than employees in the telecommunication and manufacturing sectors. Practical implications: Managers of organisations need to redesign work to embrace the challenging circumstances brought about as a result of COVID-19 and post-COVID implications. The work environment needs to be more supportive to shield employees from the physical and emotional demands of work during and after this period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today than ever, investment in the implementation of employee-assisted programmes (EAPs) and employee well-being programmes (EWPs) to equip employees with the needed skills to cope with stressful conditions has been more than justified. Originality/value: From a broader perspective, this study identifies drug abuse as a key risk factor for suicidal thoughts among employees, thereby highlighting the fact that smoking cessation programs and drug management therapies are an integral part of well-being programmes aimed at establishing equilibrium and gradually creating a wide gap between employees and suicidal thoughts. © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited.
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Human related vulnerability challenges continue to increase as organisations intensify their use of interconnected technologies for operations particularly due to the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic. Notwithstanding the challenge of a human problem on cybersecurity, existing cybersecurity measures predominately focused on technological solutions which on their own have proven to be insufficient. To ensure all-inclusive cybersecurity solution, efforts are shifting to accommodate human angle which complements technological efforts towards eradicating cybersecurity challenges hence the move to cybersecurity culture (CSC). The importance of the human-related factor on the security of information and IT system has been emphasised by various research leading to the development of Human Factor Diamond (HFD) framework. This paper at the conceptual level mapped the articulated list of identified CSC factors to the HFD framework to determine the CSC factors that are associated with the different domains of human factor framework. The mapping depicts that each domain of human factor framework has CSC factors associated to it. Management appeared as the domain with the predominate number of factors, followed by responsibility, environment and preparedness respectively. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Australian retail sector has fallen victim to the recent lockdowns due to COVID-19 pandemic, which forced retailers to adopt new technologies to conduct business online. As a result, several businesses are attempting to use Blockchain technology to enhance security and promote transparency. Prior studies indicated the importance of human factors in technology adoption decisions. However, there is limited research on how human factors play out in blockchain technology adoption decisions in the Australian retail sector. Therefore, this study identifies the human factors and presents a research model to investigate their influence on technology adoption decisions in the Australian retail sector. The proposed study will use a quantitative approach and collects data using online survey questionnaires. This study will test the derived hypotheses using the structural equation modelling technique. This study is expected to help develop appropriate policies to enhance blockchain technology adoption in the Australian retail sector. © 2022 IEEE.
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While varying degrees of participatory methods are often explored by the HCI community to enable design with different user groups, this paper seeks to add weight to the burgeoning demand for community-led design when engaging with diverse groups at the intersections of marginalisation. This paper presents a 24-month-long qualitative study, where the authors observed a community-based organisation that empowers refugee and migrant women in Australia through making. We report how the organisation led its own process to pivot from face-to-face to online delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic, analyzing the design and delivery of an app and the intersectional challenges faced by the women as they learnt to navigate online making. This paper expands feminist intersectional praxis in HCI to new contexts and critiques the positionality of researchers in this work. It contributes to the literature on design justice, providing an exemplar of how community-led design more effectively dismantles the compounding constraints experienced by intersectional communities. This paper also argues that the ethos of care and safe spaces, which are central to black feminist thought, are vital to community-led design and underpin the 10 design justice principles when executed in practice. © 2023 ACM.
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The increasingly rapid spread of information about COVID-19 on the web calls for automatic measures of credibility assessment [18]. If large parts of the population are expected to act responsibly during a pandemic, they need information that can be trusted [20]. In that context, we model the credibility of texts using 25 linguistic phenomena, such as spelling, sentiment and lexical diversity. We integrate these measures in a graphical interface and present two empirical studies to evaluate its usability for credibility assessment on COVID-19 news. Raw data for the studies, including all questions and responses, has been made available to the public using an open license: https://github.com/konstantinschulz/credible-covid-ux. The user interface prominently features three sub-scores and an aggregation for a quick overview. Besides, metadata about the concept, authorship and infrastructure of the underlying algorithm is provided explicitly. Our working definition of credibility is operationalized through the terms of trustworthiness, understandability, transparency, and relevance. Each of them builds on well-established scientific notions [41, 65, 68] and is explained orally or through Likert scales. In a moderated qualitative interview with six participants, we introduce information transparency for news about COVID-19 as the general goal of a prototypical platform, accessible through an interface in the form of a wireframe [43]. The participants' answers are transcribed in excerpts. Then, we triangulate inductive and deductive coding methods [19] to analyze their content. As a result, we identify rating scale, sub-criteria and algorithm authorship as important predictors of the usability. In a subsequent quantitative online survey, we present a questionnaire with wireframes to 50 crowdworkers. The question formats include Likert scales, multiple choice and open-ended types. This way, we aim to strike a balance between the known strengths and weaknesses of open vs. closed questions [11]. The answers reveal a conflict between transparency and conciseness in the interface design: Users tend to ask for more information, but do not necessarily make explicit use of it when given. This discrepancy is influenced by capacity constraints of the human working memory [38]. Moreover, a perceived hierarchy of metadata becomes apparent: the authorship of a news text is more important than the authorship of the algorithm used to assess its credibility. From the first to the second study, we notice an improved usability of the aggregated credibility score's scale. That change is due to the conceptual introduction before seeing the actual interface, as well as the simplified binary indicators with direct visual support. Sub-scores need to be handled similarly if they are supposed to contribute meaningfully to the overall credibility assessment. By integrating detailed information about the employed algorithm, we are able to dissipate the users' doubts about its anonymity and possible hidden agendas. However, the overall transparency can only be increased if other more important factors, like the source of the news article, are provided as well. Knowledge about this interaction enables software designers to build useful prototypes with a strong focus on the most important elements of credibility: source of text and algorithm, as well as distribution and composition of algorithm. All in all, the understandability of our interface was rated as acceptable (78% of responses being neutral or positive), while transparency (70%) and relevance (72%) still lag behind. This discrepancy is closely related to the missing article metadata and more meaningful visually supported explanations of credibility sub-scores. The insights from our studies lead to a better understanding of the amount, sequence and relation of information that needs to be provided in interfaces for credibility assessment. In particular, our integration of software metadata contributes to the more holistic notion of credibility [47, 72] that has become popular in recent years Besides, it paves the way for a more thoroughly informed interaction between humans and machine-generated assessments, anticipating the users' doubts and concerns [39] in early stages of the software design process [37]. Finally, we make suggestions for future research, such as proactively documenting credibility-related metadata for Natural Language Processing and Language Technology services and establishing an explicit hierarchical taxonomy of usability predictors for automatic credibility assessment. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Playing games with friends and family provided a way to stay connected and deal with isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, restrictions introduced to co-located events affected how both regular and casual players scheduled, organised, participated and engaged with various games. Through an online survey, we aimed to gain preliminary insights into how the swift switch from physical to remote play - forced by the circumstances - impacted the gameplay experiences and how different players potentially changed their playing habits. Our preliminary results suggest that computer-mediated communication systems successfully allowed the translation of co-located game sessions, but also highlight the emergence of different points of player friction during remote game experiences, e.g., the tediousness of scheduling and setup, miscommunication or playmates' wellbeing. We discuss future research and design opportunities that explore the potential to augment social game experiences at a distance and debate the future of remote or hybrid play. © 2022 Owner/Author.
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Globally, countries have been developing contact tracing applications to control the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease. In this work, we present the findings of eight focus groups we conducted with participants living in France and Germany, to explore why they decided to adopt, or not adopt, a contact tracing application as well as understand how they perceived the benefits, drawbacks, and threat model of a contact tracing application. © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
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Many employees and employers are negatively affected by the ongoing Coronavirus disease pandemic. Although the infection spread has decreased during the summer 2022, the possibility of being infected still is high. There are plenty of industries that are forced to work onsite, and they must ensure a safe work environment by mitigating related risks and their negative effects on the health of employees and enterprise business continuity. In order to take control over the situation in offices, shops, factories and other working places, it is proposed to develop a Covid-19-safe workplace platform for infection risks monitoring and minimization. The platform is based on a risk model, which can help an employer to follow the rules and create safe work conditions for his employees. Scientific articles, safe work environment requirements and recommendations connected to the Covid-19 infection, its spread and control factors were studied and considered. As a result the risk model that has data about risks, their impact, hazard and mitigation measures was created. © 2022 IEEE.
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Along the COVID-19 pandemic, people with autism spectrum disorders faced additional disadvantages and challenges for continuing with their learning and support therapies remotely. We have carried out research in several phases since the first wave of the pandemic, to obtain the global picture of the benefits and issues that come with online education and assistance for individuals on the spectrum. Based on our findings, we present in this poster a preliminary inclusive design that address accessibility barriers for people with autism when facing remote learning, so they can have a continuous and independent development of their learning process. © 2022 Owner/Author.
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Work stress can have serious deleterious effects for individuals and society and therefore its management is of great importance. Work environment has been demonstrated as one of the significant factors effecting work stress. Recently, COVID-19 has led to an increased frequency of individuals working in hybrid work environments mainly comprising of home and office environments. The effects these work environments have on individuals’ mental stress is important to understand for both employers and employees so they can mitigate and effectively manage the mental stress. In this paper, we present an intelligent approach to predict the stress occurrences using the physiological data acquired from individuals working in both remote and office locations. Multiple factors are collected related to physiological indicators of stress and subjective performance level. We developed a boosted tree ensemble model which produced binary stress classification accuracy of 99.9%. The statistical outcomes indicate that there is no overall correlation between mental stress and productivity, however there is some indication of mental stress being is influenced by the work environment, the time of day and the day of the week. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Collaboration is one required skill for the future workforce that requires constant practice and evaluation. However, students often lack formative feedback and support for their collaboration skills during their formal learning. Current technologies for emergent learning due to COVID-19 could make visible digital traces of collaboration to support timely feedback. This work aims to automatically detect the group work environment using speech data captured during group activities. Grounded in literature and students’ perspectives, this work defines and implements three indicators for detecting the work environment namely noise, silence and speech time. Three experts rated two hundred thirty-two video instances lasting 30-secs each to get a group work environment score. We report the results of two machine learning models for detecting the group work environment and briefly reflect on these results. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Human error is a leading contributing factor to several well-known reactive chemistry and loss-of-containment events that involve unloading trucks to storage tanks or processing equipment. Driving,connecting hoses,and initiating (and ending) chemical transfers requires worker actions that must be completed correctly in spite of these activities being done in an ever-changing work environment. Workers are faced with doing their jobs correctly in spite of personnel turnover,budget constraints,changes in technology,and organizational changes that sometimes add third parties (drivers,loaders,and operators) who may not understand the chemical,physical,or fire hazards of the job. Recent challenges brought by COVID-19 have added stressors and changes to the workplace that make it even more difficult toget it right the first time.For decades,industry has been trying to reduce human error and unlock the mystery of why good employees make poor decisions that can create high-consequence events. Neuroscience research is identifying methods to implement human factor controls that reduce risk,and this information can be applied from the boardroom to the shop floor to improve the reliability of our operations. Critical organizational elements - including work environments,technological interfaces,operating procedures,training,work schedules and leadership actions - are often not aligned with how our brains work. Copyright © American Institute of Chemical Engineers. All rights reserved.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the use of technology in classroom experience with group collaborative projects. Group collaboration and the skills absorbed at the time of collaboration is an essential part of a student’s higher educational journey, because it prepares students for workplace collaboration post-graduation [1]. Prior to graduating, an undergraduate student will encounter at least one group project that is classified as a required deliverable in at least one of their course curriculums. In all technology related curriculums, computer-mediated communication (CMC) is an essential part of an instructor’s course material deliverable process, the way instructors communicate with their students, and the way students communicate with their peers. The need for a shift in the way humans communicate with one another has increased tremendously within the past two years [2]. We evaluated how effective CMC tools can enhance student outcomes for group projects specifically in the Covid-19 era and how students adopt to creative ways to engage and apply technology for effective communication. We also analyzed human factors confronting the use of CMC tools in the context of social distance policies and collaborative projects. We concluded by examining implications of group collaboration projects mandated in institutions for student success in the pandemic era. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Since the pandemic, most work environments have changed to home-based settings, which mainly serve for living purposes other than working purposes. There is no lack of studies in the impact of indoor environmental quality (IEQ) factors on occupant productivity in regular work environments;however, limited studies are conducted in home-based work environments, not to mention in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, an online survey was developed to explore the impact of IEQ factors on productivity between office-and home-based work environments among occupants with different genders and ages. A comprehensive list of key indicators was first developed. Then a survey was developed, distributed, and received 204 complete responses. The descriptive analysis and t-test are performed to evaluate the impact difference of all the IEQ factors on productivity of different occupants. The findings indicate that the visual factors' impact on productivity decreases for both genders, the impact of all factors on productivity for younger occupants increases when work from home (WFH), and the impact of acoustic quality is the highest among all five IEQ factors. Because of WFH as the future of work, this study can provide insights for future built environment design. © 2021 Computing in Civil Engineering 2021 - Selected Papers from the ASCE International Conference on Computing in Civil Engineering 2021. All rights reserved.
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A common bullying problem being faced in public sector organizations is that some direct managers focus on a limited group of achieving employees while leaving other employees without responsibilities and this issue exists both in-office and remote working environments. Such problem causes stress and demoralization and unhealthy work environment. As what has been practiced nowadays during the COVID-19 pandemic, the educational sector in Bahrain shifted to online teaching where up to 70% of its employees have been directed to work from home. The purpose of this research is to investigate the problem of workplace bullying on the educational sector in Bahrain during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research aims to provide a solution to overcome bullying in terms of workload inequality in educational institutions and improve healthy work environments after the COVID-19 remote working experience. Through adopting combination of behavioral approach, human-centered design, and design thinking, the methodology of this study was developed. Some case studies of bullying experiences were reviewed. A mixed-method approach including quantitative and qualitative tools are used to collect data. A survey was designed to find out how employees are affected by bullying. Interviews were conducted with some managers in a Higher Educational Institutes who worked remotely. In the ideation phase, the Lotus Blossom tool was used for brainstorming and collecting ideas. The proposed solution and actions were evaluated using the three hats technique to check the viability, desirability, and feasibility of the ideas and to Identify the strong and weak points and re-ideate for the final set of solutions. The proposed solution is a model that composes of four parts related to business, technology, and social (i.e. people behavior) realistic constraints. Also, a course has been developed in Leader Actions to help maintain equal workloads across their teams. © 2021 IEEE.
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We report on a Diary Study investigating daily practices of Self-care by seven UK adults living with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), to understand their routines, experiences, needs and concerns, informing Self-care technology design to support living well. We advance a developing HCI literature evidencing how digital tools for self-managing health do not meet the complex needs of those living with long-term conditions, especially those from marginalised communities. Our evaluation of using a Self-care Diary as Design Probe responds to calls to study Self-care practices so that future digital health tools are better grounded in lived experiences of managing multi-morbidity. We contribute to HCI discourses including Personal Health Informatics, Lived Informatics and Reflection by illuminating psychosocial challenges for practicing and self-reporting on Self-care. We offer design implications from a Critical Digital Health perspective, addressing barriers to technology use related to trust, privacy, and representation, gaining new significance during the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022 ACM.
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The elderly population worldwide got immensely affected by the increased isolation and risk for complications due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Notably, elderly women get more affected by social isolation and distress irrespective of health factors. We aim to understand how urban elderly women in Southeast Asia-typically highly dependent on the other family members due to cultural practices-took care of their mental health with uncertainty and distress using technology during the social distance period. Through 19 semi-structured interviews with participants from six Southeast Asian countries and analyzing the data using thematic analysis, we surfaced that our participants started learning different technology with great enthusiasm and used them for their mental well-being during the pandemic period. This paper portrays how our participants enhanced interpersonal bonding, cultivated self-care and creative outlets, and facilitated positivism around their social circle using different technology platforms to mitigate their stress and uncertainty during the pandemic. Our participants' technology usage for better mental well-being during the COVID-19 period provides HCI researchers with valuable design guidelines. Here, we contribute by expanding the HCI community's understanding of technology design within the intersection of the elderly population and mental health for the Southeast Asian cultural context. © 2022 ACM.
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In this paper, we explore how computing device use by people with upper extremity impairment (UEI) was affected by COVID-19. Someone with UEI has reduced use of their shoulders, upper arms, forearms, hands, and/or fingers. We conducted six (6) semi-structured interviews with participants with UEI in the US. We found that people with UEI increased computing device use during COVID-19 not only for remote interactions but also in person. Additionally, social distancing for COVID-19 safety created the need for new assistive technology (AT), authentication requirements, and communication platforms, which introduced their own accessibility barriers. We also found that personal protective equipment (PPE) created new barriers during computing device use, which often caused people with UEI to choose COVID-19 safety over the usability of their computing devices. Based on these findings, we describe future opportunities to make computing devices more accessible for people with UEI to manage the shifts in computing device use introduced by COVID-19. © 2022 ACM.
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Mobile Learning is crucial to the continuity of healthcare education during COVID-19. Despite its penchant for the traditional delivery of course content through classroom and clinical settings, M-Learning proved to be a viable solution in a pandemic due to social isolation, community restrictions, and safety concerns. We invited 219 frontline learners from 3 universities, active healthcare professionals who are currently enrolled, to test a structural model based on the Theory of Reason Action. We positioned the human factors of cognitive, social, and affective needs as determinants of attitude in the behavioral intention to adopt M-Learning. We further hypothesize that social norms positively influence the behavioral intention to adopt M-Learning among healthcare frontliners. We applied PLS-SEM to analyze the survey data and revealed that human factors positively influence attitude, leading to the behavioral intention to adopt M-Learning. Social norms and their influence on the behavioral intention to adopt this technology are not supported. We discuss the implications of our study, acknowledge its limitations while mapping out directions for future works to understand M-Learning adoption further. © 2021 29th International Conference on Computers in Education Conference, ICCE 2021 - Proceedings. All rights reserved