Editorial

Dear reader,

As in previous years, this first issue in 2018 contains, among other contributions, a selection of highly ranked papers from last year’s Mensch und Computer conference that are presented here in a revised and extended form. The first two papers are concerned with controlling technical systems with novel interaction techniques. Controlling radiological images during surgical interventions via foot interaction is the topic of the first paper by Benjamin Hatscher, Maria Luz, and Christian Hansen. Roman Herrmann and Ludger Schmidt use gestural input and head-mounted AR to steer a drone and compare it with a conventional remote control. In their study, they find the standard remote to be overall more efficient than the ‘natural’ user interface which may dampen somewhat the enthusiasm for the novel interaction technique. I believe we need to perform, and publish, studies of this kind that help to critically assess in different contexts new, inventive interaction techniques that are too often uncritically praised in the community.

The third paper by Maximilian Mackeprang and co-authors investigates a new interaction design for semantically annotating documents. This development aims at overcoming the obstacles that still exist when users who are experts in their domain, but not familiar with Semantic Web technologies want to apply these methods in their work. More on the UX side, Thomas Schmidt and Christian Wolff present the results of a study in which they analyze the influence of several UI design attributes on UI aesthetics. They differentiate the intuitive, first-glance impression from longer-term reflective aesthetic judgements, finding a strong correlation between these two aspects of aesthetic judgement. The final paper in the MuC collection by Catherine Alberola, Götz Walter, and Henning Brau addresses an issue that is often encountered in practical usability work: Well-established questionnaires such as the User Experience Questionnaire UEQ are often considered too long by test participants outside the academic usability lab, especially when one wants to obtain a large number of responses in online studies. The authors perform a large-scale analysis of UEQ in the domain of home appliances and show that the number of items in UEQ can be reduced from 26 to 11 items without loosing the high reliability and validity of the original questionnaire.

This issue also presents an extended version of the DeLFI 2017 best paper. Henrik Bellhäuser and his co-authors investigate the question whether considering personality traits in the composition of learner groups can improve their performance with respect to different criteria. They choose conscientiousness and extraversion as relevant traits and present an algorithmic approach for group formation based on these factors. They find that a mixed group composition with respect to these personality traits results in enhanced group satisfaction and performance.

In a contributed research article, Alexander Mirnig and co-authors discuss under which circumstances drivers do or do not (or should not) develop trust in automated vehicles, an issue that is currently also subject of much public debate. They analyze various trust-related aspects, especially the concepts of overtrust and undertrust and draw some analogies to the field of dynamic web service composition. Based on insights in this other domain, which is also characterized by a high level of automation, they present some guidance on communicating trustworthiness and calibrating trust in way that neither over- or undertrust is likely to occur.

Finally, in the practitioners’ section, Kirstin Kohler, Dominik Madden, and Horst Schneider present a set of patterns for designing interactions that span different devices and screens which increasingly happens in different settings such as smartphone–large display couplings.

Jürgen Ziegler

Editor-in-Chief