Editorial

Dear reader!

In 2023 we changed the publication model of the journal from print to online only. Published articles will be available in the publisher’s digital library when they have been processed by production. This change is closely linked to changing the journal to (Golden) Open Access. From 2023 all new articles in i-com will be Open Access. This should greatly extend the visibility of the content published in i-com. In parallel, the publisher has decided to make all articles published in i-com before 2023 available free of charge. So, not only work published from 2023 will gain from a higher visibility, but all work published in i-com from its start – which already can be seen in growing CiteScore metrics. Many thanks to the publisher for making this possible!

For this second Open Access only issue we have asked Gerrit Meixner, Markus Dahm, Patrick Harms and Abbey Campbell to collect material for a special issue on “Augmenting Usability Evaluation”.

The guest editors wrote in their Call for Papers: “There exist many guidelines, norms, and standards on how a user interface can be evaluated traditionally within the field of Human-Computer Interaction. However, the evaluation itself is still to be executed by humans. This can be a tedious, erroneous, lengthy, and expensive task. Furthermore, the results can vary depending on the executing expert. Therefore, this important stage in the development of interactive applications is often shortened or omitted altogether. It is desirable to both support and streamline the evaluation of the usability of an application. The support may or may not replace the human in the loop. It is expected that in most cases, humans will still have the last word when it comes to classifying and judging the results of the support. Hence a full automatization is a topic of the future, currently we look forward to many ways of an augmentation of the evaluation process in usability engineering.”

Sorrily, only one manuscript submitted to this call made it in time through the review and resubmission process. Additional papers on the topic will be published in the next issue of the journal. The article on the special issue topic is: “DUX: A dataset of User Interactions and User Emotions” by Patrick Harms, Dominick Leppich, Carina Bieber, Katrin Proschek and Ulf Schubert. The authors report about the creation of a public dataset of keystroke, mouse and touchscreen interactions and the corresponding user emotions – to allow for research on the correlation of these two types of information.

In addition to the articles on Augmenting Usability Evaluation we have other submissions in the scope of the journal’s topics in this issue:

In “Constraint-based bare-hand immersive 3D modeling” Thomas Jung, Johann Habakuk Israel, Ruben Ahlhelm, and Patrick Bauer present a new gesture-free 3D modelling technique called “3D touch-and-drag”. Since the new interaction technique allows for controller-free 3D manipulation of objects without gestures, it makes it possible to integrate haptic feedback into 3D manipulations.

In “Fostering Skills with Chatbot-based Digital Tutors – Training Programming Skills in a Field Study” Sebastian Hobert reports about the development of a chatbot-based digital tutor that can support novice programmers using individualized, automated conversations based on adaptive learning paths and in-depth code analyses. The evaluation of the solution ran over a full lecture period including 155 participants.

Finally, we again have a contribution from the practitioners in our field by Matthias Laschke, Madlen Kneile, Till Maria Jürgens and Lara Christoforakos. In “The Thing That Made Me Think Navigating Challenges and Embracing Opportunities of (Pro-) Active Technology for Behavior Change in the Context of Sustainability” the authors address (pro-)active technology for behavior change in the context of sustainability. In particular, they explore the use of humor as a design element to dampen the resulting resistance.

I hope you enjoy reading the contributions in this second issue of Volume 22 of i-com – Journal of Interactive Media.

Michael Koch (Editor-in-Chief)