2014, Gebhardt, Christoph, Rädle, Roman, Reiterer, Harald

This paper presents Integrative Workplace, a system which blends the qualities of digital and physical sources by augmenting physical books with properties of digital books and vice versa. On the base of Blended Interaction, we designed a system which helps users to interact with the new and unfamiliar functionality of augmented documents and apply it to accomplish a real world task. In a user study, law students employed Integrative Workplace to work on a legal case. The positive feedback of participants indicated that we managed to design a system which is usable in a professional context. Furthermore, the study revealed evidence that participants apply Conceptual Blending to understand user interfaces and that digitally well-established concepts are a part of users’ reality. These findings resonate with the theoretical foundation of Blended Interaction. The results of this user study encourage us to continue to use Blended Interaction in the design process of novel user interfaces with an unfamiliar functionality.

2012, Rädle, Roman, Jetter, Hans-Christian, Reiterer, Harald

Although Web search is typically regarded as a solitary activity, collaborative search approaches are becoming an increasingly relevant topic for HCI and distributed user interfaces (DUIs). Today’s collaborative search systems lack comprehensive search support that also involves pre- or post-search activities such as preparation or sensemaking. We believe that post-WIMP DUIs can help to better support social search and have identified four design goals that are critical for their successful design. In consequence, we present TwisterSearch, an interactive DUI prototype that meets our four design goals.

2012, Rädle, Roman, Jetter, Hans-Christian, Reiterer, Harald

This demo presents TwisterSearch, a system for co-located and collaborative Web search that was designed in accordance with the canonical model of social search by Evans and Chi (2009). In a first phase before search, participants frame the context of the intended search and thereafter gather initial information requirements on a tabletop. These requirements are then refined through discussion and yield the foundation for the search task itself, which is performed in parallel on multiple mobile displays. These private devices are used to search the Web for evidence files and to populate the visual workspace of the tabletop with them. Moreover, the personal device allows both a highly parallel search as well as a tightly-coupled collaborative search, to enable seamless switching between collective and solitary search activities. In our TwisterSearch demo, participants can have a firsthand experience of these different individual phases of social search.