Högskolan i Skövde

Complex decision-making is a prominent aspect of requirements engineering and the need for improved decision support for requirements engineers has been identified by a number of authors. A first step toward better decision support in requirements engineering is to understand decision-makers’ complex decision situations. To gain a holistic perspective of the decision situation from a decision-makers perspective, a decision situation framework has been created. The framework evolved through a literature analysis of decision support systems and decision-making theories. The decision situation of requirements engineers has been studied at Ericsson Microwave Systems and is described in this thesis. Aspects of decision situations are decision matters, decision-making activities, and decision processes. Another aspect of decision situations is the factors that affect the decision-maker. A number of interrelated factors have been identified. Each factor consists of problems and these are related to decision-making theories. The consequences of this for requirements engineering decision support, represented as a list that consists of desirable high-level characteristics, are also discussed.

In the present study, 64 users were asked to convey eight distinct emotion to a humanoid Nao robot via touch, and were then asked to evaluate their experiences of performing that task. Large differences between emotions were revealed. Users perceived conveying of positive/pro-social emotions as significantly easier than negative emotions, with love and disgust as the two extremes. When asked whether they would act differently towards a human, compared to the robot, the users’ replies varied. A content analysis of interviews revealed a generally positive user experience (UX) while interacting with the robot, but users also found the task challenging in several ways. Three major themes with impact on the UX emerged; responsiveness, robustness, and trickiness. The results are discussed in relation to a study of human-human affective tactile interaction, with implications for human-robot interaction (HRI) and design of social and affective robotics in particular. 

Social robots are expected gradually to be used by more and more people in a widerrange of settings, domestic as well as professional. As a consequence, the features and qualityrequirements on human–robot interaction will increase, comprising possibilities to communicateemotions, establishing a positive user experience, e.g., using touch. In this paper, the focus is ondepicting how humans, as the users of robots, experience tactile emotional communication with theNao Robot, as well as identifying aspects affecting the experience and touch behavior. A qualitativeinvestigation was conducted as part of a larger experiment. The major findings consist of 15 differentaspects that vary along one or more dimensions and how those influence the four dimensions ofuser experience that are present in the study, as well as the different parts of touch behavior ofconveying emotions.

The ANEMONE is a methodological approach for user experience (UX) evaluation of action and intention recognition in human-robot interaction that has activity theory as its theoretical lens in combination with the seven stages of action model and UX evaluation methodology. ANEMONE has been applied in a case where a prototype has been evaluated. The prototype was a workstation in assembly in manufacturing consisting of a collaborative robot, a pallet, a tablet, and a workbench, where one operator is working in the same physical space as one robot. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidance on how to use ANEMONE, with a particular focus on the data analysis part, through describing a real example together with lessons learned and recommendations.

Socially interactive robots are expected to have an increasing importance in everyday life for a growing number of people, but negative user experience (UX) can entail reluctance to use robots. Positive user experience underpins proliferation of socially interactive robots. Therefore, it is essential for robot developers to put serious efforts to attain social robots that the users experience as positive. In current human-robot interaction (HRI) research, user experience is reckoned to be important and is used as an argument for stating that something is positive. However, the notion of user experience is noticeably often taken for granted and is neither described nor problematized. By recognizing the complexity of user experience the intended contributions can be even more valuable. Another trend in HRI research is to focus on user experience evaluation and examination of user experience. The current research paths of user experience of socially interactive robots are not enough. This chapter suggests that additional research directions are needed in order accomplish long-term, wide-spread success of socially interactive robots.

Socially interactive robots are expected to have an increasing importance in human society. For social robots to provide long-term added value to people’s lives, it is of major importance to stressthe need for positive user experience (UX) of such robots. The human-centered view emphasizes various aspects that emerge in the interaction between humans and robots. However, a positive UX does not appear by itself but has to be designed for and evaluated systematically. In this paper, the focus is on the role and relevance of UX in human-robot interaction (HRI) and four trends concerning the role and relevance of UX related to socially interactive robots are identified, and three challenges related to its evaluation are also presented. It is argued that current research efforts and directions are not sufficient in HRI research, and that future research needs to further address interdisciplinary research in order to achieve long-term success of socially interactive robots.

The industrial transition to Industrie 4.0 and subsequently Industrie 5.0 requires robots to be able to share physical and social space with humans in such a way that interaction and coexistence are positively experienced by the humans and where it is possible for the human and the robot to mutually perceive, interpret and act on each other's actions and intentions. To achieve this, strategies for humanrobot interaction are needed that are adapted to operators’ needs and characteristics in an industrial context, i.e., Operator 5.0. This paper presents a research design for the development of a framework for human-robot interaction strategies based on ANEMONE, which is an evaluation framework based on activity theory, the seven stages of action model, and user experience (UX) evaluation methodology. At two companies, ANEMONE is applied in two concrete use cases, collaborative kitting and mobile robot platforms for chemical laboratory assignments. The proposed research approach consists of 1) evaluations of existing demonstrators, 2) development of preliminary strategies that are implemented, 3) re-evaluations and 4) cross-analysis of results to produce an interaction strategy framework. The theoretically and empirically underpinned framework-to-be is expected to, in the long run, contribute to a sustainable work environment for Operator 5.0.

Simulation-based training for prehospital emergency care is characterized by high degrees of complexity. Thorough knowledge of both the work and the setting is crucial and it is therefore important to involve both end-users and other stakeholders during the whole design process. This paper investigates a design process by focusing on how project participants experience the work process and participation of a multi-disciplinary, research-practitioner design team. This case study focuses on the work within a development project of a new prehospital emergency training facility. Open-ended interviews were conducted with the project participants halfway through the project. Strikingly, the results show that while there are problems and tensions that potentially could overturn the project, all participants express strong satisfaction with their participation in the project. This implies that the accumulated positive experiences are so strong that they overshadow tensions and problems that under other circumstances could have caused a project breakdown.

The education of students to become competent user experience designers is a delicate matter as students need to obtain a multitude of knowledge, skills, and judgmental abilities. In this paper, our effort to manage this multiplicity in a bachelor’s program in user experience design is shared along with our experiences and teaching practices influenced by theories of situated and embodied cognition together with reflective teaching. The program was followed up through interviews with eight alumni and a company representative that employs user experience designers. The results show that the program overall works well, although some of the identified issues need to be addressed in the future. The interpretation is that our program curricula and teaching practices are fruitful, which hopefully can contribute to thoughts and discussions for other teachers in the field of user experience design and human-computer interaction.

Complex decision-making is a prominent aspect of requirements engineering and the need for improved decision support for requirements engineers has been identified by a number of authors. A first step toward better decision support is to understand decision-makers’ complex decision situations. Aspects of decision situations are decision matters, decision-making activities, and decision processes. In this paper we present two requirements engineering decision processes and their decision-making activities and decision matters. These were identified in a case study conducted at Ericsson Microwave Systems. We also discuss the consequences of these for requirements engineering decision support.

Complex decision-making is a prominent aspect of requirements engineering (RE) and the need for improved decision support for RE decision-makers has been identified by a number of authors in the research literature. Decision-supporting features and qualities can be integrated in RE tools. Thus, there is a need to evaluate the decision-supporting capabilities of RE tools. In this paper, we introduce a summative, criteria-based evaluation method termed DESCRY, which purpose is to investigate to what extent RE tools have decision-supporting capabilities. The criteria and their related questions are empirically as well as theoretically grounded.

Complex decision-making is a prominent aspect of requirements engineering (RE) and the need for improved decision support for RE decision-makers has been identified by a number of authors in the research literature. A first step toward better decision support in requirements engineering is to understand multifaceted decision situations of decision-makers. In this paper, the focus is on RE decision-making in large scale bespoke development. The decision situation of RE decision-makers on a subsystem level has been studied at a systems engineering company and is depicted in this paper. These situations are described in terms of, e.g., RE decision matters, RE decision-making activities, and RE decision processes. Factors that affect RE decision-makers are also identified.

Affective touch has a fundamental role in human development, social bonding, and for providing emotional support in interpersonal relationships. We present, what is to our knowledge, the first HRI study of tactile conveyance of both positive and negative emotions (affective touch) on the Nao robot, and based on an experimental set-up from a study of human–human tactile communication. In the present work, participants conveyed eight emotions to a small humanoid robot via touch. We found that female participants conveyed emotions for a longer time, using more varied interaction and touching more regions on the robot’s body, compared to male participants. Several differences between emotions were found such that emotions could be classified by the valence of the emotion conveyed, by combining touch amount and duration. Overall, these results show high agreement with those reported for human–human affective tactile communication and could also have impact on the design and placement of tactile sensors on humanoid robots.

Socially Assistive Robots (SAR) has been suggested as an important technology in the shift of care from institution to home environments, and has been shown to nr effective in addressing loneliness and social isolation among older adults (Lee et al. 2023., Lorenz et al., 2016, Shishehgar et al., 2018). In a newly started research project RO-LIV, we employ a user experience design approach, involving older adults as co-designers and engaged actors, in order to identify needs, solutions, and obstacles for integrating socially assistive robots into older adults' homes. The research is organized into three work packages: Needs Analysis, Current Situation Analysis, and Conditions and Obstacles for Integration into the Home Environments. The expected results include a road map for the integration of socially assistive robots into older adults' homes, informed by a nuanced understanding of user needs and preferences. Overall, we emphasize the importance of adopting a user-centered approach in human-robot interaction research, particularly when designing solutions for older adults. By involving older adults in the design process and addressing their diverse needs, researchers can develop robotic systems that are address real user needs, are socially acceptable, and has an increased potential for adoption and impact on quality of life.

Aims: Recent world events have resulted in companies using remote meeting tools more often in design processes. The shift to remote meeting tools has had a notable impact on collaborative design activities, such as design reviews (DRs). When DRs depend on computer-aided design (CAD) software, the lack of direct support for CAD functionalities in videoconferencing applications introduces novel communication challenges, i.e. friction. This study investigates friction encountered in real world remote DRs when using a combination of standard CAD and videoconferencing applications. The objective was to understand the main sources of friction when carrying out DRs using a combination of CAD and videoconferencing applications.

Methods: At a single Swedish automobile manufacturer, 15 DRs of a fixture component were passively observed. These observations were subjected to a qualitative thematic analysis to identify categories and sources of friction during these DRs. The DRs were carried out using a combination of CATIA CAD software and Microsoft Teams for videoconferencing.

Results: The analysis of the 15 remote DRs identified four recurring friction categories: requesting specific viewpoints, indicating specific elements, expressing design change ideas, and evaluating ergonomics. Each category highlights specific challenges that were observed during the DRs and emerged due to constraints imposed by existing methods and technologies for remote meetings.

Conclusion: This study provides a framework for understanding the current sources of friction in remote DRs using videoconferencing tools. These insights can support the future development of DR software tools, guiding the integration of features that address these friction points. Additionally, the results serve as a guideline for organizations to implement methods that reduce friction in remote DRs and improve DR quality and efficacy.

In recent years, we have seen an ever increasing push for new public e-services. Such e-services must be useful and beneficial for governments but also for citizens. In order to develop e-services that are effective, efficient and satisfactory for the citizens, the citizens have to be kept in focus and be involved in the development process. However, municipalities face pressure to develop a wide range of e-services, but at the same time battle palpable scarce resources. In this paper, a concept that addresses this problem within an ongoing research project is presented. We express this concept as ‘figurative user participation through the use and reuse of empirically grounded personas with help of persona repository including usage guidance that is shared among several municipalities’. The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore municipalities’ perceptions and attitudes towards this concept. The result shows that the municipalities are positive to the concept and consider it having great potentials. However, some challenges and pitfalls have also been brought out that need to be taken into account and addressed. 

A fundamental challenge of human interaction with socially interactive robots, compared to other interactive products, comes from them being embodied. The embodied nature of social robots questions to what degree humans can interact ‘naturally' with robots, and what impact the interaction quality has on the user experience (UX). UX is fundamentally about emotions that arise and form in humans through the use of technology in a particular situation. This chapter aims to contribute to the field of human-robot interaction (HRI) by addressing, in further detail, the role and relevance of embodied cognition for human social interaction, and consequently what role embodiment can play in HRI, especially for socially interactive robots. Furthermore, some challenges for socially embodied interaction between humans and socially interactive robots are outlined and possible directions for future research are presented. It is concluded that the body is of crucial importance in understanding emotion and cognition in general, and, in particular, for a positive user experience to emerge when interacting with socially interactive robots.

The coexistence of robots and humans in shared physical and social spaces is expected toincrease. A key enabler of high-quality interaction is a mutual understanding of each other’s actionsand intentions. In this paper, we motivate and present a systematic user experience (UX) evaluationframework of action and intention recognition between humans and robots from a UX perspective,because there is an identified lack of this kind of evaluation methodology. The evaluationframework is packaged into a methodological approach called ANEMONE (action and intentionrecognition in human robot interaction). ANEMONE has its foundation in cultural-historicalactivity theory (AT) as the theoretical lens, the seven stages of action model, and user experience(UX) evaluation methodology, which together are useful in motivating and framing the workpresented in this paper. The proposed methodological approach of ANEMONE provides guidanceon how to measure, assess, and evaluate the mutual recognition of actions and intentions betweenhumans and robots for investigators of UX evaluation. The paper ends with a discussion, addressesfuture work, and some concluding remarks.

The industrial evolutions require robots to be able to share physical and social space with humans in such a way that interaction and coexistence arepositively experienced by human workers. A prerequisite is the possibility for the human and the robot to mutually perceive, interpret and act on each other's actions and intentions. To achieve this, strategies for human-robot interaction are needed that are adapted to operators’ needs and characteristics in the industrial contexts. In this paper, we aim to present various taxonomies of levels of automation, humanrobot interaction, and human-robot collaboration suggested for the envisioned factories of the future. Based on this foundation, we propose a compass direction for continued research efforts which both zooms in and zooms out on how to develop applicable human-robot interaction strategies that are worker-centric in order to obtain effective, efficient, safe, sustainable, and pleasant human-robot collaboration and coexistence.

For social robots, like in all other digitally interactive systems, products, services, and devices, positive user experience (UX) is necessary in order to achieve the intended benefits and societal relevance of human–robot interaction (HRI). The experiences that humans have when interacting with robots have the power to enable, or disable, the robots’ acceptance rate and utilization in society. For a commercial robot product, it is the achieved UX in the natural context when fulfilling its intended purpose that will determine its success. The increased number of socially interactive robots in human environments and their level of participation in everyday activities obviously highlights the importance of systematically evaluating the quality of the interaction from a human-centered perspective. There is also a need for robot developers to acquire knowledge about proper UX evaluation, both in theory and in practice. In this chapter we are asking: What is UX evaluation? Why should UX evaluation be performed? When is it appropriate to conduct a UX evaluation? How could a UX evaluation be carried out? Where could UX evaluation take place? Who should perform the UX evaluation and for whom? The aim is to briefly answer these questions in the context of doing UX evaluation in HRI, highlighting evaluation processes and methods that have methodological validity and reliability as well as practical applicability. We argue that each specific HRI project needs to take the UX perspective into account during the whole development process. We suggest that a more diverse use of methods in HRI will benefit the field, and the future users of social robots will benefit even more.

We here present results and analysis from a study of affective tactile communication between human and humanoid robot (the NAO robot). In the present work, participants conveyed eight emotions to the NAO via touch. In this study, we sought to understand the potential for using a wearable affective (tactile) interface, or WAffI. The aims of our study were to address the following: (i) how emotions and affective states can be conveyed (encoded) to such a humanoid robot, (ii) what are the effects of dressing the NAO in the WAffI on emotion conveyance and (iii) what is the potential for decoding emotion and affective states. We found that subjects conveyed touch for longer duration and over more locations on the robot when the NAO was dressed with WAffI than when it was not. Our analysis illuminates ways by which affective valence, and separate emotions, might be decoded by a humanoid robot according to the different features of touch: intensity, duration, location, type. Finally, we discuss the types of sensors and their distribution as they may be embedded within the WAffI and that would likely benefit Human-NAO (and Human-Humanoid) interaction along the affective tactile dimension.

The purpose of this paper is to promote sustainability as an important research topic within the computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) community. CSCL can play a crucial role in the achievement of sustainability, which is paramount for the well-being of current and future generations. While CSCL brings formal educational settings to mind, computers and cooperative learning should be considered in a wider perspective since learning also takes place in and through people’s everyday practices. This paper considers two on-going research projects outside mainstream CSCL research, to illustrate ways that technology can lead to changed practices for the benefit of increased environmental and social sustainability. The projects concern children’s online practices and social sustainability, and information and communication technology (ICT) and practices in sustainable agriculture, respectively.

Product returns are not only costly for e-tailers, but the unnecessary transports also impact the environment. Consequently, online retailers have started to formulate policies to reduce the number of returns. Determining when and how to act is, however, a delicate matter, since a too harsh approach may lead to not only the order being cancelled, but also the customer leaving the business. Being able to accurately predict which orders that will lead to a return would be a strong tool, guiding which actions to be taken. This paper addresses the problem of data-driven product return prediction, by conducting a case study using a large real-world data set. The main results are that well-calibrated probabilistic predictors are essential for providing predictions with high precision and reasonable recall. This implies that utilizing calibrated models to predict some instances, while rejecting to predict others can be recommended. In practice, this would make it possible for a decision-maker to only act upon a subset of all predicted returns, where the risk of a return is very high.

Customer churn is one of the most challenging problems for digital retailers. With significantly higher costs for acquiring new customers than retaining existing ones, knowledge about which customers are likely to churn becomes essential. This paper reports a case study where a data-driven approach to churn prediction is used for predicting churners and gaining insights about the problem domain. The real-world data set used contains approximately 200 000 customers, describing each customer using more than 50 features. In the pre-processing, exploration, modeling and analysis, attributes related to recency, frequency, and monetary concepts are identified and utilized. In addition, correlations and feature importance are used to discover and understand churn indicators. One important finding is that the churn rate highly depends on the number of previous purchases. In the segment consisting of customers with only one previous purchase, more than 75% will churn, i.e., not make another purchase in the coming year. For customers with at least four previous purchases, the corresponding churn rate is around 25%. Further analysis shows that churning customers in general, and as expected, make smaller purchases and visit the online store less often. In the experimentation, three modeling techniques are evaluated, and the results show that, in particular, Gradient Boosting models can predict churners with relatively high accuracy while obtaining a good balance between precision and recall. 

The e-service concept has been a central concern in many research and practitioner areas in recent years. There are expectations of citizens, customers, commercial companies and public organizations of what e-services are, their functionality and benefits. However, there is conceptual confusion that may hamper collaboration and research viability. This paper explores the conceptual vagueness and presents an empirical investigation of how the e-service concept is treated in practice, along with its kindred concept “IT service”. Results show that public and commercial organizations approach e-services differently, that translation problems can cause lack of comparability in research results, and that additional concepts may be introduced instead of e-service.