Kuldeep Kulshreshtha
email: kuldeepk@uxarmy.com

Andreea I Niculescu
email: andreea-n@i2r.a-star.edu.sg

Bimlesh Wadhwa
email: bimlesh@nus.edu.sg

On the design and evaluation of Nippon Paint Color Visualizer application -a case study

Keywords: coloring technology app, user research, interaction design

In this paper, we present a case study focusing on the design challenges and evaluation process of Color Visualizer, a mobile phone application developed for Nippon Paint Singapore. The application enables users to visualize paint color on home interiors and decide on the best color match. Color Visualizer was incrementally built upon iterative design & successive development sessions, all based on extensive hours of user research. Design decisions, evaluation results, lessons learned and future work are presented.

Introduction

Color has always played a vital role in our lives as powerful tool of communication. Also, it's a well-known fact, that colors can have a profound effect on our emotional well-being. Thus, choosing the right color when painting our home is of crucial importance. However, the selecting process can be daunting not only because of the paradox of choice or conflict of preferences, but also because of the inability to visualize several color effects on real walls. Paint companies are increasingly investing in digital tools to help consumers overcome this challenge. Color Visualizer is one such mobile application recently launched by Nippon Paint Singapore [START_REF]Nippon Paint Mobile App -Color Visualizer[END_REF].

Designing a good color visualizer is a challenging process. Firstly, because digital painting, in contrast to physical painting poses several technical hardships, such as identify edges and corners in a room image, separate objects from walls, and handle diversity in image attributes caused by different camera types and room illumination. Especially, in cases where walls have irregular edges, rooms vary in style and illumination or pictures have low resolution the challenge is by far not trivial.

Secondly, there are obvious discrepancies in image processing performance between humans and computers that tend to generate disappointment for first time users: humans have excellent skills of understanding space semantics, i.e. distinguishing between walls, ceiling, objects placed in a room and as they often expect computers to see the reality similarly to themselves (see figure 1). Thirdly, differences in users' proficiency with image processing software, such as MS paint or Photoshop make hard to decide on the most appropriate interaction style: keeping operation tools similar to those found in such programs would beneficiate experts but exclude novice users; on the other side, designing new interaction ways would probably confuse MS paint and Photoshop experts. Fourthly, budget and strict time limitation are adding up to existing challenges. Thus, the goal of our user studies was to determine what real painting elements are crucial for the app's user experience (UX), how users would 'paint' their walls using the app and whether there are any important user needs left unrecognized.

Iterative design & evaluation studies

The first coloring app developed in this project enabled users to use different color schemes to color the walls by using finger tapping and selecting a color using the color bar. Deleting the color could be accomplished by dragging from an unfilled space into the colored area. Functions, such as saving projects for late re-use or for sharing with friends, as well as identifying paint store locations on a map were included in the app. Figure 2 shows the application's original design: the small size of the phone screen caused the color to spill over requiring several corrective touches. A first user study with 18 participants (11 female & 7 male) age 24-35yrs was performed in our lab. Our interest at this stage was to determine whether basic users' expectations toward the app were generally met. Participants were selected to fulfill the following criteria: own a house in Singapore, own an iPhone 5 and above, had significant involvement in painting their own house in the past 12 months or had plans to engage in painting activities within the following 12 month.

Participants were asked to perform the following tasks with the app: 1) 'paint' walls and ceilings using pictures taken from their own home or from the test lab1 2) save the 'painting' projects for later use; 3) buy paint using the app; 4) share the 'painting' screenshots with friends and relatives. Additionally, they were presented with two alternative features adopted from Photoshop: layering and masking, i.e. using a 'virtual' tape to cover furniture when 'painting' the walls. The features were part of other coloring applications from a competitor brand and we were interested to find out whether such functions could be useful for our app as well.

The sessions were conducted by a moderator accompanied by an observer. After completing each task, participants were interviewed using unstructured in-depth interview techniques. The questions were based on their immediate experience with the app. When discrepancies were found (between what was done vs. what was reported), laddering techniques were used to explore unconscious motivations behind users' actions. Each session lasted for 1h and 15 minutes. Both interviews, as well as users' interactions with the app were recorded to facilitate further analysis.

The results uncovered several app deficiencies, such as confusing menus, unclear color recommendations, as well as lack of control when painting or deleting colors. The coloring screen was found to be complicated and hard to use while exported pictures were missing color codes making hard to identify the same color nuance in the shop. Users seemed uncomfortable sharing the pictures in social media, however saving and emailing pictures was found to be a useful feature. Masking and layering functionalities seemed to create problems to those unaccustomed to Photoshop who were unable to complete this task without facilitator's help. In general, participants found the app to be difficult to control, "unpredictable" in action and "inefficient" in execution. Overall, the impression was of a poor UX. The results obtained from the first user study made clear the app wasn't ready to launch yet.

Based on participants' feedback and careful analysis of video recordings, the team decided to re-design the coloring screen and simplify the coloring process. Confusing elements, such as 'delete color' was replaced with an eraser brush. An undo functionality was added to allow for more flexibility. The color bar was replaced with a color picker: users could select a color from a thumbnails palette and apply the color to any desired picture area. For coloring, re-coloring or erasing, simple tapping could be used. A gallery of pre-masked pictures was added in response to requests from several (mostly males) participants: such pictures would enable users to visualize on the spot how painted walls would look like in a fully furnished environment -see fig 3 .  Another evaluation session was run with 30 participants (14 female & 16 male, aged 24-35yrs) to validate the improvements. Selection criteria, interviews techniques and scenario tasks remained identical to the first user study. Results confirmed improvements: the app was considered easy to use and allowing for a finer control during coloring and erasing. The colored walls shown on the user interface had a natural look with a better color effects visualization on shadows, sunlight and lighting.

Further, participants requested to use single taps to cover most of the wall/ceiling and tap rub to color the leftover area. Users also expressed the desire to see the color variation on the walls in picture thumbnails for comparison, as well as to have gallery pictures displaying typical Singapore home environments, i.e. the current app used mostly images from Western homes.

The design and development time between the user evaluations took almost 3 months. With another two months of fine tuning, the app was launched in December 2016 in iOS and android version. Currently, the app usage has grown in the past few months up to 30k downloads.

Conclusions and future work

While painting is a simple task in real life, translating it into the digital world turned out to be a challenge. In-depth interviews and user behavior analysis were of fundamental importance for understanding the user journey's utmost details. Such details sum up the ultimate user experience. Along the way, we learned a few lessons worth sharing: 1. design for simplicity; 2. focus on people's natural tendencies -for example, it was observed that users usually accomplish a task by single tapping at an interactive element; 3. wrongly assumed background knowledge in graphic tools, such as Photoshop and MS paint could be counterproductive. Particularly relevant to our application, we learned that the colour picker was indeed a useful feature for inspecting selected colours while the 3D model of a real room (with painted walls and furniture as in fig. 3) helped users to decide more easily on the best colour match.

In the future, we plan to incorporate single toggle button for coloring/erasing, enable rubbing to add paint in left out areas, replacing colors using the palette with just one finger tap, keeping a history of colored room pictures for comparison, manage user expectation by recoloring uploaded pictures with the last used paint color. We also plan to persuade users to continue using the app by making coloring a fun experience so that Nippon can increase its sales and creates stronger brand connection with its customers.

Fig. 1 :

 1 Fig. 1: View of a room: humans (LEFT) vs. computers (RIGHT)

Fig. 2

 2 Fig. 2 Screen shot first design

Fig. 3

 3 Fig. 3 App improved design

Pictures could be taken using the camera phone or chosen from the photo gallery.


Lakshmi Deshpande
email: lakshmi.deshpande@tcs.com

From Minutes of Meeting to 'Memories of Meeting' How we designed impactful and engaging Visual MoM for Client Visit

Keywords: New Work Methodology, Design thinking, Visual Meetings, Sketch Notes, Doodling, Graphic Recording, Visual Listening, Collaboration Tool, Client Engagement, Customer Relationship, Visualization technique

Meetings in a business context are organized for a wide range of purposes and with varying contexts. Minutes of Meeting, are a good tool for capturing the formal discussions, but fail to capture finer details. Recognizing this limitation, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) decided to use an innovative visual note-taking approach to capture a client visit. The objective was to have a single graphic encapsulate the events across all days of the visit, to ensure a good client recall and create a lasting impact.

Introduction

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is a leading IT Services company based out of India providing IT and business solutions to global clients. Client engagement is an extremely important part of the business for TCS. An international client's top management was visiting India for four days to discuss TCS's capabilities in the space of Digital Reimagination. From TCS's perspective, the visit was an opportunity to demonstrate capabilities to strengthen and grow the client-TCS relationship. Given the importance of the client, the business unit was keen on innovative approaches for creating greater impact. The User Experience (UX) team was thus approached. It was decided that a Visual MoM would greatly complement the standard Minutes of Meeting. This approach to visual note-taking would entail a Graphic Recorder (GR), observe the events from the entire client visit. The idea was to switch from the conventional whosaid-what, towards an event-capturing approach.

The intent of the graphic was to seize not only what happens in the meeting room, but also the experiences and memories of the client during their trip to the country. 'Memories of Meeting' would add a sense of personal touch as opposed to pure data capturing associated with Minutes of Meeting. The final output would be a printed Graphic-presented as a souvenir. This would remain with the clients as memories of their visit, and serve well for continued customer engagement.

Preparation Prior to the Meeting

The meeting was spread across four days at various TCS offices across the country. A week before this, following preparation was done-

Preparatory Work

Even though most of the information for the graphic was to be gathered real-time, the GR did considerable prior preparation.

1. GR connected with the cross-located TCS teams to understand the purpose of the visit, client's background and also TCS capability to be showcased. 2. GR got an understanding of the key interest areas for the client. The client had operations in 100+ countries and the business focus was on continuous, reliable and sustainable performance. 3. Cultural aspects-GR tried to ensure that the graphic was sensitive to the cultural nuances of the client. 4. The method finalized for creating the visual-Sketch during the meeting, validate the visuals with stakeholders and finally print the digitized output.

Key Decisions for the GR

Mood: The GR decided to limit dry facts and numbers in the graphic. That information was to be reserved for accompanying business documents. The Visual MoM had to look lively yet corporate; personalized yet professional.

Layout and Illustrations: All four days had to be captured in one visual. Since a fourcolumn layout would have been linear and somewhat rigid, the layout was divided into four quadrants, placing agenda center stage. A cyclic structure also emphasized the clients' round trip to India. All illustrations were hand-drawn on paper then digitized, set against a white canvas, for a good contrast.

Color Palette: Brand Identity colors of TCS (Blue) and its Client (Red), with Yellow accents for highlights were used. The interaction between the two organizations is depicted using these colors. The GR was aware that color semantics can greatly impact viewer's expectations, hence mindful while using the same.

Tools: For quick and efficient capturing of moments, GR had to use basic pen, paper and markers for creating the first draft of the Visual MoMs. Final graphic was created using HP inkjet scanner and printer, Adobe Photoshop, Wacom Pen tablet.

The Meetings

Day 1-Gandhinagar: This was an orientation session, showcasing overall TCS capabilities to the Client. The Client met the offshore team for the first time in person. This was the beginning of recording the key events of the client trip.

Day 2-Mumbai: TCS showcased its round the clock support to the onsite tech team.

The GR sketched throughout-even during the meals and break times. This enabled GR to capture casual moments of the meeting as well. Indian food was frequently discussed.

Including the same in the illustration, provided the necessary personal touch and increased recall at a later date for the client.

Day 3-Chennai: Technological capabilities were showcased in TCS labs. Capturing this was important for future client reference. Many casual topics were interspersed to increase the recall. For e.g. dramatic weather differences across India, an active topic of discussion, was included to make the graphic more detailed and personal.

Day 4-Mumbai: The closing discussion focused on the roadmap of the visit. At this point the client expected a recap of the points to take home. Again, keeping the formal and casual mix of the illustration, the GR captured the technical projects that were discussed along with the casual conversation like beverage preferences.

Wrap-Up: Post completion of the client visit, the GR set about collating the illustrations created during the course of the four days. Post collation and review by the business team, the illustrations were digitized. A high quality A3 sized print out of the Visual MoM was presented to each client, on their return to home country.

Challenges and Learnings

 Groundwork: Advance preparation ensured that during the actual meeting, focus was on understanding the happenings and translating them to visuals. Time spent prior on learning the basics of technical and business aspects was crucial.  Data Validation: As a designer, the GR was not well versed with the technical aspects and the Client's business. Teaming up with stakeholders who understood the topics at hand well thus became very important.  Time Constraint: GR had to work very fast to keep pace with the meeting schedule.

There was limited time to experiment. Hence, an iterative approach with regular feedback had to be adopted. This saved significant rework in case of changes.  Voluminous Data: There was a lot of collated data from the four day visit. Data refinement is a time consuming yet important activity, so as to have a crisp mean-ingful output. The advance preparation was helpful in identifying the important business aspects that were key to the Visual MoM. For informal and personal things, the GR went with her insights to ensure the Visual MoM has the desired feel.  Design Style: The graphic stood out and was memorable because of its distinct illustrative style with touches of humor, which added the desired personality.  Discreteness: The GR took visual notes discretely, so as to not impede the flow of discussions in any manner.

Conclusion

Feedback from stakeholders: "It was received extremely well by the customers! Already print outs have been made and displayed at their workstations! They appreciated the memory part, the fun part & the highlights of the visit -all mixed in a very balanced manner. They just loved it." Such feedback demonstrated that the approach was effective in ensuring the key points of the meeting were highlighted and remained in Clients' memory.

The Visual MoM would go a long way in strengthening the Client-TCS relationship.

Post the success of this engagement, this approach has been adopted for several important client engagements in TCS.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Final Visual MoM presented to the client, at their office


Naveen Bagalkot
email: naveen@srishti.ac.in

Tomas Sokoler
email: sokoler@itu.dk

Riyaj Shaikh
email: riyaj.shaikh@srishti.ac.in

Gaurav Singh

Anders Edelbo Lillie

Pratiksha Dixit

Aditi Rai

Chakravarthy Vignesh

Ashwin Senthil

ReRide A Platform to Explore Interaction with Personal Data Before, During, and After Motorcycle Commuting

Keywords: Motorbike Riding, Personal Informatics, Cloud-based Platform, Interactive Prototype

à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Introduction

The motorcycle could soon be a new frontier for the exploration of humancomutper interaction [START_REF] Bagalkot | Reride: Performing Lower Back Rehabilitation While Riding Your Motorbike in Traffic[END_REF] , particularly personal informatics. Personal informatics is a set of pervasive and mobile tools that are aimed at supporting people to collect, parse, and present personal information towards self-monitoring and self-reflection [3]. Currently, riders engage with multiple forms of digital information about the motorbike through the 'glanceable' dashboard. They also engage with non-digital 'cues' while riding such as such as traffic movement, road and weather conditions, etc., which constantly keep changing. What if information about the rider's condition such as body posture, lean angles, and heartrate, were also made available as part of the ride experience? This is an open research question inviting exploration. The enabling technology components seem to be mature but focused design efforts work is needed to put the components together and explore and define the multifaceted space of opportunities.

In this paper we present a demo of a system designed and implemented to explore the design of personal informatics tools for motorbike commuting and help us conduct in-situ evaluation of such tools. We present the system architecture of our cloud based platform enabling wireless real-time data capture, storage and presentation across multiple devices. We demonstrate the capabilities of the system by presenting a case instantiation in the form of an interactive soft-and-hardware prototype that collects rider's posture data, visualizes the data on the motorbike dashboard in real-time, and pushes the data to the cloud server for later retrieval. We speculate this demonstration opens up the space for further designing, prototyping, and evaluation of personal informatics tools for motorbike commuting along multiple directions. For example, one direction is to explore presenting the information not only during the ride, but also before and after the ride. Another is to explore the design of Personal Informatics tools not only for a single rider but a group of riders sharing their data synchronously and asynchronously across devices and experiences.

System Architecture

Figure 1: System Architecture and Programming Modules

The system architecture for the platform is made up of several individual components and programming modules (see figure 1). An input sensor, such as a Force Sensitive Resistor (FSR) is attached to a Genuino microcontroller with embedded Bluetooth capability, and an Internet connected smart phone make up the environmental sensing device. Data collected during the ride is pushed to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT Cloud Platform, which does all the message relaying and cloud computing. This Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has much different functionality required to store, process and evaluate the data sent to it. Any Internet-connected client device can connect to the PaaS and subscribe to or pull information from a custom generated API, which can be visualized over either a browser or a native application.

Watching Your Back While Riding: An Instantiation

To demonstrate the system, we present one example instantiation, in the context of tracking and displaying data about the rider's lower-back posture during the ride [START_REF] Bial | Enhancing Outdoor Navigation Systems Through Vibrotactile Feedback[END_REF] . Consider the following scenario: Diva commutes to her work on her motorbike daily. She has been doing so for the past 5 years, and now is in the danger of developing repetitive strain injury of her lower back. To prevent the injury she has to perform stretching exercises, but she does not have the time or the energy at the end of day to do so. She then starts using ReRide. ReRide consists of two parts: a) A sensing part that is part of the seat cushion and b) a display unit that displays this information real-time, next to the motorbike's dashboard. As Diva rides her bike through the traffic she gets continuous feedback of her lower-back posture. During the ride she keeps changing adjusting her posture and stretching her back, thereby performing a part of her prescribed preventive exercises.

Components of the Prototype

The interactive hard-and-software prototype comprises of (see figure 2): 1) A sensor patch placed right beneath the rider's seat consisting of two FSRs, which measure pressure to derive and inform variations in the posture while riding a motorbike. The sensor has a resolution of 1024 levels, with 0 being lowest and 1023 being the highest pressure. We segment this range into four equal parts. Pressure sensor reading are captured and colour coded into these four segments. 2) Two square shaped force sensitive resistors (FSR) are sandwiched between the seat cushion and seat cover. To increase the pressure sensitivity, an additional layer of foam sheets has been applied on top of these sensors. The sensors are connected to Genuino analog input with a 10KΩ fixed resistor in between. Wires connecting sensors with the breadboard are encapsulated inside a rubber tube.

3) A processing unit with the Genuino board (with inbuilt Bluetooth Low Energy module), 9 Volt battery and circuit that reads the FSR value, timestamps it, and transmits it to the display device through bluetooth. 4) A Display device positioned alongside the dashboard, which is bluetooth enabled touchscreen unit capable of running google chrome mobile browser [START_REF] Li | A Stage-Based Model of Personal Informatics Systems[END_REF] . It communicates with the processing unit via bluetooth, and to communicate with the AWS it uses a 3G/4G mobile internet connection. The Display is divided into two panels (see figure 2). The left panel displays live posture data in the form of a continuous horizontal scroll, displaying information for the past three minutes of the ride. We use color shade of the same tint to indicate how much the rider's back is under stress. The darker the shade, more the stress. The right panel displays rider's posture variation for the entire ride along with the ride duration.

Concluding Remarks

In this paper we presented a demo of a system designed and implemented as platform exploring the design of personal informatics tools for motorbike commuting and help us conduct in-situ evaluation of such tools. Currently we are working with industrial designers to shape the sensing and display units as integral parts of a motorbike. We are also working on building the prototype to cover other possible scenarios of engagement with lower-back posture data before and after the ride. We envision how a rider may check information about their last ride displayed on the motorbike just before they begin a new ride. Or dig deeper into their historic data, possibly in combination with other relevant data such as traffic patterns, on their personal smartphones while sitting in a lounge.

In this sense, one can see how the demonstration opens up the space for researchers to further explore the design of Personal Informatics tools for motorbike commuting across devices, experiences, and situations. As such, we present the demo as an invitation to Personal Informatics and HCI community to further explore the challenging, yet underexplored frontier of interacting with computation as part of motorbike commuting.

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: The display, sensing unit, and the processing unit.

Emerging works in HCI research has focused on exploring the means to display digital information to the rider [1] [2] [4] [5].

The motivation behind the design is explained in[START_REF] Bagalkot | Reride: Performing Lower Back Rehabilitation While Riding Your Motorbike in Traffic[END_REF], and is beyond the scope of this paper.

For the purpose of demonstration we have used the Nexus 5X.


Oliver Beren Kaul
email: [kaul@hci.uni-hannover.de

Kevin Meier
email: kevin.meier@netzdenke.de

Michael Rohs
email: rohs]@hci.uni-hannover.de

Increasing Presence in Virtual Reality with a Vibrotactile Grid around the Head

Keywords: vibrotactile feedback, virtual reality, immersion, presence

A high level of presence is an important aspect of immersive virtual reality applications. However, presence is difficult to achieve as it depends on the individual user, immersion capabilities of the system (visual, auditory, and tactile) and the concrete application. We use a vibrotactile grid around the head in order to further increase the level of presence users feel in virtual reality scenes. In a between-groups comparison study the vibrotactile group scored significantly higher in a standardized presence questionnaire compared to the baseline of no tactile feedback. This suggests the proposed prototype as an additional tool to increase the level of presence users feel in virtual reality scenes.

Introduction

Current generation virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) use high-quality visual displays in order to stimulate the user's visual sense for a variety of applications. Along the visuals, common VR applications also use spatial sound to increase the level of presence in certain situations such as in horror games. However, the tactile channel is largely neglected due to difficulties in finding a suitable solution that is acceptable in terms of aesthetics, price, and implementation complexity.

In a previous work we presented HapticHead [START_REF] Beren | HapticHead: 3D Guidance and Target Acquisition through a Vibrotactile Grid[END_REF][START_REF] Beren | HapticHead: A Spherical Vibrotactile Grid around the Head for 3D Guidance in Virtual and Augmented Reality[END_REF], a vibrotactile display around the head consisting of a bathing cap with a chin strap and a total of 20 vibrotactile actuators (see Fig. 1). We showed that our prototype can be used in 3D guidance and localization scenarios in both VR and augmented reality (AR) with relatively high precision and low task completion time. It has already been shown that different kinds of tactile feedback increase the level of presence in a VR scene or game [START_REF] Dinh | Evaluating the importance of multi-sensory input on memory and the sense of presence in virtual environments[END_REF][START_REF] Sallnäs | Supporting presence in collaborative environments by haptic force feedback[END_REF][START_REF] Maria | Opinion: From presence to consciousness through virtual reality[END_REF]. The purpose of this work is to investigate the effect of a vibrotactile around-the-head HMD on the level of presence that users experience in a VR environment. In order to do this, we implemented two VR scenarios enhanced by vibrotactile feedback and compared them to no vibrotactile feedback in a between-groups comparison study.

Related Work

Tactile Displays

In the research area of tactile displays Paneels et al. [START_REF] Paneels | What's around me Multi-actuator haptic feedback on the wrist[END_REF] investigate tactile patterns on a bracelet for indicating directions and find that static patterns are not well recognized due to the actuators being too close and being recognized as one impulse instead of multiple impulses (funneling illusion) while dynamic patterns are recognized with higher accuracy.

ActiveBelt [START_REF] Tsukada | ActiveBelt: Belt-Type Wearable Tactile Display for Directional Navigation[END_REF] is the first vibrotactile belt for directional navigation. Vibrotactile belts have also been used to increase the situational awareness of gamers [START_REF] Pielot | Where is my team? Supporting Situation Awareness with Tactile Displays[END_REF] and for guiding visually impaired people [START_REF] Akansel Cosgun | Evaluation of rotational and directional vibration patterns on a tactile belt for guiding visually impaired people[END_REF].

Haptic Radar [START_REF] Cassinelli | Augmenting spatial awareness with haptic radar[END_REF] is a ring around the head, consisting of multiple infrared sensors and vibrotactile actuators in order to give users a "spider sense" of approaching objects. A similar concept is Proximity Hat [START_REF] Berning | ProximityHat[END_REF], which uses pressure instead of vibrotactile actuators and stimulates other receptors (Merkel disks). Kerdegari et al. [START_REF] Kerdegari | Head-Mounted Sensory Augmentation Device: Comparing Haptic and Audio Modality[END_REF] developed a firefighter helmet with seven vibrotactile actuators on the forehead. Their experiment shows lower route deviation times in a navigation task for vibrotactile compared to auditory feedback.

Israr et al. [START_REF] Israr | Tactile brush[END_REF] present Tactile Brush, an interpolation concept for multiple tactile actuators arranged in a grid in order to purposefully generate a moving tactile funneling illusion, which simulates the feeling of a continuous motion with a single localization point even though multiple actuators are active at a time. Further work on the funneling illusion [START_REF] Kerdegari | Centralizing bias and the vibrotactile funneling illusion on the forehead[END_REF] shows that the spacing of actuators should be 2.5 cm or less on the forehead for the funneling illusion to occur for most users. HapticHead uses a spacing of at least 8 cm, so we do not expect the funneling illusion to arise. Myles et al. [START_REF] Myles | Guidelines for Head Tactile Communication[END_REF] investigate the vibrotactile sensitivity of different head regions and use a headband with 4 actuators to provide navigational cues to soldiers. They found that soldiers preferred a tactile to a visual or auditory display for directional cueing and that the forehead, frontal, parietal, and temple regions were most sensitive to tactile stimuli.

Immersion and Presence in Virtual Reality

In this paper we use the terms immersion and presence following the definition by Slater [START_REF] Slater | A note on presence terminology[END_REF]. Immersion refers to the objective level of sensor fidelity a VR system provides, while presence refers to a user's subjective psychological response to a VR system. Of course, the level of presence is somewhat correlated to the level of immersion a system can provide but also highly dependent on the concrete VR scene.

Pausch et al. [START_REF] Pausch | Quantifying immersion in virtual reality[END_REF] investigated the performance difference of a system with and without increased visual immersion in a search task scenario and found that users were faster in the immersive condition because they had a better spatial understanding of their virtual surroundings. Dinh et al. [START_REF] Dinh | Evaluating the importance of multi-sensory input on memory and the sense of presence in virtual environments[END_REF] evaluated the effect of haptic feedback (wind and heat) on user presence in VR. The effect of a vibrotactile vest and pants on user presence and collision detection in VR was explored by Ryu et al. in [START_REF] Ryu | Using a vibro-tactile display for enhanced collision perception and presence[END_REF]. They found that their prototype did enhance the user's sense of presence, especially when combined with spatial sound. Just like the system by Ryu et al., our system aims to increase the level of presence in VR. However, we decided to give vibrotactile feedback around the head as such feedback could easily be integrated into existing VR HMDs instead of requiring additional garments. Myles and Kalb [START_REF] Myles | Guidelines for Head Tactile Communication[END_REF] recommend actuators on the head to operate at frequencies between 32 and 150 Hz because of discomfort above that threshold. We decided to use actuators operating at 150 Hz at maximum because actuator size increases for equally strong impulses at lower frequencies.

Prototype

Our prototype consists of a bathing cap with 17 vibration motors (Parallax, 12 mm coin type, 3.3 V, 90 mA, 9000 rpm) attached on the inside and distributed on the whole surface (Fig. 1). The non-stretchable chinstrap hosts another three vibration motors and can be adjusted to different head sizes using a Velcro fastener. The vibration motors are controlled by PWM signals of four Arduino Nanos on a switchboard, which are connected to a stationary PC through USB and are updated at 90 Hz. This prototype was first presented in [START_REF] Beren | HapticHead: 3D Guidance and Target Acquisition through a Vibrotactile Grid[END_REF], in which its performance for 3D guidance was evaluated.

On the software side, vibration motors are modeled at their corresponding position in a Unity scene [START_REF]Unity Technologies. Unity -Game Engine[END_REF]. This allows for easy spatial activation of selected motors, depending on the VR scene and task. The user's head is tracked by the internal sensors of the HMD that is used in conjunction with HapticHead. In the experiment reported below we use an Oculus Rift CV1.

Experiment

We designed an experiment to measure possible effects of vibrotactile feedback in VR scenes on presence. Our initial hypothesis was that appropriate tactile feedback increases the level of presence in VR scenes. We chose a betweensubjects study design where the experiment group experienced the VR scenes with tactile feedback and sound, while the control group experienced the same VR scenes with sound but without tactile feedback.

A total of 20 participants (6 female, mean age 24.1, SD 2.5 years) were invited and split up in equally sized experiment and control groups. 11 participants had previous experience with VR HMDs and applications. All participants filled out a mandatory informed consent form and optionally a photographic release form.

Measuring Presence

In a measurement of psycho-physiological parameters for presence (e.g., electromyography or galvanic skin response) Nacke and Lindley showed significant differences for different experiment conditions [START_REF] Nacke | Flow and immersion in first-person shooters[END_REF]. However, these significant differences could not be clearly correlated to participants' responses in accompanying questionnaires, which means that the real causes and effects of those differences still need to be researched.

Instead of trying to measure presence in a quantitative psycho-physiological way, we decided to use a widely used qualitative method presented by Witmer et al. [START_REF] Witmer | Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire[END_REF]. Their "Immersion Tendency Questionnaire" (ITQ) measures how likely a person is immersed by a movie or game in general and the "Presence Questionnaire" (PQ) measures the level of presence a person was experiencing in a previous experimental condition. This method requires a between-subjects study design for comparable results as all other effects need to be canceled out.

Witmer et al. evaluated their original ITQ and PQ questionnaires, identified and removed irrelevant questions which did not correlate with the overall result and the participants' own assessment of the level of presence [START_REF] Witmer | Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire[END_REF]. We used these reduced questionnaires and translated the remaining questions to German (the native language of the participants). We further rephrased all of them as statements in order to measure agreement with 7-point Likert scales instead of the proposed 7-point semantic differential scales. We used Likert scales because they are easier to answer (always strongly disagree to strongly agree as options) and often less vague depending on the adjectives used in semantic differential scales which can cause reliability issues [START_REF] Tucker | Reliability of semantic differential scales: The role of factor analysis[END_REF]. We also added one statement to the PQ, letting participants state how well they were able to survey their environment due to haptic clues. Witmer et al. did not use any haptic stimulations in their experiments.

Virtual Reality Environments

Two VR environments were implemented as exemplary cases. These were augmented by tactile feedback.

Header Simulation In our soccer header simulation (HS) four catapults and occasionally a plane above the user throw balls in the direction of the user's head. The user's position is right in the center between four goals.

In the beginning of the 20-minute header simulation scene, only a few balls are thrown towards the user one by one. The task of the user is to head the ball into any of the goals. As time progresses the frequency of balls being thrown increases and it may also happen that multiple balls arrive at the same time. In the last third of the simulation planes appear occasionally and drop balls on top of the user in order to increase the challenge. Users can see a goal score indicator for further motivation.

Participants can locate the balls visually and through spatial sound from the catapults when a new ball is being launched. In the vibrotactile feedback group participants also experience vibrotactile stimuli interpolated between the three closest motors in the direction of the ball. One stimulus is played when the ball is launched (100 ms) and another stimulus is played when the ball impacts on the participant's head (200 ms).

Viking Village In the viking village simulation (VV) we took one of Unity's standard environments called "Viking Village" from the Unity asset store and enhanced it with visual, auditory, and vibrotactile rain and snow effects. The user experiences a 15-minute camera tour on a wooden wagon, hears effects such as rain (5 minutes), snow (5 minutes), and cracking flames. Participants of the experiment group also feel rain or snow as single droplets hit their head causing small vibrotactile stimuli at the nearest actuator position. A slightly less intense effect for snowflakes (100 ms, 75 % of the maximum intensity) than for rain droplets (200 ms, 100 % of the maximum intensity) is played.

It is possible to play "catch the particle" by moving the head towards nearby rain droplets or snowflakes and then feel their impact at the corresponding position. Obviously, feeling impacts on facial areas is not correctly modeled as there are no actuators between forehead and chin.

Procedure

After arriving in our lab, participants introduced to the Oculus Rift CV1. If they were part of the experiment group, they were also introduced to the HapticHead prototype. In addition, they were informed about the experimental procedure and filled out consent forms as mentioned above. Furthermore, they filled out the modified "Immersion Tendency Questionnaire" before starting with the first experimental condition.

Depending on whether the participants were in the experiment or control group, they experienced the soccer header VR scene, as explained above, with or without tactile feedback generated by the HapticHead prototype. After finishing the first VR scene there was a pause and participants were asked to fill out the modified PQ.

In the second part of the experiment, participants experienced the viking village VR scene, again with or without tactile feedback depending on whether they were in the experiment or control group and filled out another modified PQ. We further asked the participants to estimate how much time had passed after each VR scene because an increased level of presence can alter time perception [START_REF] Sanders | Time perception, immersion and music in videogames[END_REF]. Participants of the experiment group finally filled out another questionnaire on the usefulness and appropriateness of the tactile feedback.

Results

Results from the Likert scales in both, the ITQ and PQs were summed up per participant, resulting in the total ITQ and PQ scores per participant as intended by Witmer et al. [START_REF] Witmer | Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire[END_REF]. Even though Likert scales are usually ordinal scales we chose to also report the mean and standard deviation due to large variances between participants and for comparability (Witmer et al. also chose to report mean and standard deviation in their work [START_REF] Witmer | Measuring Presence in Virtual Environments: A Presence Questionnaire[END_REF]).

The modified ITQ yielded a median total score of 79.5 (mean 78.6, SD=12.6) for the control group and 91.5 (mean 87.7, SD=12.9) for the experiment group. A Mann-Whitney U test reveals a slight tendency, but no statistically significant differences between the groups (p=0.08 > 0.05).

After the first VR scenario (soccer header simulation), the modified PQ yielded a median total score of 71.5 (mean 69.7, SD=14.1) for the control group and 91.0 (mean 87.7, SD=14.3) for the experiment group. A Mann-Whitney U test reveals a statistically significant difference between the two groups (p < 0.01).

When asked about the total time they thought the 20-minute soccer header simulation took, the participants of the control group (mean 26.5 minutes) esti-mated almost the same time as the participants of the experiment group (mean 26.0 minutes).

The modified PQ after the second VR scenario (viking village simulation) yielded median total scores of 60.0 (mean 57.2, SD=17.5) for the control group and 77.5 (mean 74.7, SD=22.3) for the experiment group. A Mann-Whitney U test reveals a statistically significant difference between the two groups (p=0.027 < 0.05).

When asked about the total time they thought the 15-minute viking village simulation took, again the participants of the control group (mean 18.8 minutes) estimated almost the same time as the participants of the experiment group (mean 19.0 minutes). The participants of the experiment group filled out a questionnaire on vibrotactile appropriateness and usefulness at the end of the experiment. Results are shown in Fig. 4. Interestingly, there are some statements with very mixed opinions between participants. As a common pattern, some participants rated the vibrotactile feedback negatively in most of the statements while others rated it positively in most statements which comes down to whether they liked it overall or not. Some participants who disliked the feedback also stated that they disliked the humming sounds of the vibration motors which were close to the ears. Eight of 10 participants of the experiment group agreed that such vibrotactile technology should be incorporated into other applications.

Discussion

The difference between the immersion tendency scores of the experiment and control groups is unfortunately close to being statistically significant. This indicates that the two groups were not perfectly balanced. Ideally, the ITQ-scores of both groups should be equal and the p-value should be larger. We suspect that the number of 10 participants per group was too small to cancel out outliers effectively. However, as the difference in ITQ-scores between the groups is not statistically significant, we can compare the results of the presence questionnaires directly.

Both presence questionnaires yielded a statistically significant difference between the two groups. This means that the vibrotactile feedback definitely had an effect on the level of presence users were experiencing in the VR scenes. The participants' duration estimates of the scenes were not significantly different between groups, but both longer than the actual time the scenes took. We suppose that this is due to the scenes being rather long, which may have resulted in boredom and exhaustion.

Estimated duration values for the viking village scene were generally lower in both groups than for the soccer header scene. We suppose that this is caused by the much lower degree of interactivity of the viking village scene compared to the soccer header scene. The former was essentially just a camera tour through the scene and the participant could only move sideways a little and turn the head on the camera wagon. The scene was also quite long at 15 minutes, which led some participants to complain about being bored as to the low degree of interactivity. Furthermore, the vibrotactile augmentation did not make the weather effects feel more natural to the majority of the members of the experiment group. This indicates that the simulation itself could be improved.

Limitations

The relatively low number of 10 participants per group led to a tendency of the groups being almost statistically different in the ITQ results. More balanced groups would have been preferable.

The vibrotactile augmentation of the weather effects in the viking village scene did not lead to more a natural experience for the majority of the participants. Our concrete implementation lacked and could probably be improved using an iterative design approach for the weather effects.

Conclusion

The presented study shows that adding vibrotactile feedback around the head can significantly increase the level of presence a user experiences in certain VR scenes. This can be applied in immersive games as well as certain VR training simulations where the level of presence or spatial awareness (including collision prevention) is important such as in complex maintenance jobs, anxiety therapy, or flight training.

HapticHead is a relatively complex prototype with questionable aesthetics, but it could be integrated with future VR HMDs to enable 3D tactile feedback in VR environments. A greater vision of this vibrotactile prototype is to combine it with other tactile garments and produce a fully tactile and very immersive VR experience. This paper is also a first step in finding implications for the design of vibrotactile feedback in VR scenes such as what kind of vibrotactile feedback works best for the simulation of virtual rain. We will investigate these implications in future work.

Fig. 1 :

 1 Fig. 1: HapticHead prototype, to be combined with an HMD.

Fig. 2 :

 2 Fig. 2: Soccer Header Simulation in VR.

Fig. 3 :

 3 Fig. 3: Enhanced Viking Village VR scene with different weather effects.

Fig. 4 :

 4 Fig. 4: Appropriateness of Vibrotactile Feedback


Christos Sintoris
email: sintoris@upatras.gr

Nikoleta Yiannoutsou
email: nyiannoutsou@upatras.gr

Nikolaos Avouris
email: avouris@upatras.gr

Nikolaos Nikoletayiannoutsou

Avouris

Design of Location-Based Mobile Games: Introduction

Keywords: location-based games, ideation, game design, card-based design methods

à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Introduction

This course introduces key concepts of location-based mobile games and their design. Location-based games are playful activities situated in specific real world locations. They involve human activity, as they necessitate moving in physical space, while it has been shown that they are conducive to learning, leading to acquisition of skills like critical thinking, curiosity, creativity, collaboration, consideration of multiple perspectives, social awareness, responsibility and media fluency [START_REF] Schrier | Using augmented reality games to teach 21st century skills[END_REF]. In addition, their content may relate to rich information about the game location.

Various terms have been used to describe location-based mobile games. They have been called pervasive games, hybrid reality games, augmented reality games, GPS games, emphasizing different aspects of them.

The course is 80' long and is made of four parts. The course handouts include the set of slides that will be used, and background papers discussing key concepts, the design framework and typical game examples, as well as material for the hands-on part of the course.

Principles of location-based games

A recurring view of what constitutes the game-space of location-based games involves the consideration of their dual character of overlapping physical and digital dimensions. Some of the activity takes place in the physical domain and involves actions such as moving to a location, observing a physical object, taking pictures or recording sounds. At the same time, a part of the activity takes place in the digital domain where the players interact with simulated characters and events, where they generate information in digital form and consume information or engage in problem-solving activities like solving puzzles. The two spheres are not clearly separated though and involve deep interconnections between the social, physical and virtual spheres.

To describe and understand location-based games one needs to consider their main constituting dimensions: the ludic, the learning, the spatial, the social, and the interaction [START_REF] Sintoris | MuseumScrabble: Design of a mobile game for children's interaction with a digitally augmented cultural space[END_REF]).

In the course, each one of them will be covered, with examples and design principles. Any time we are engaged in playful activity we cross a "magical circle" and enter a new space: that of game play. New rules, new characters, new stories evolve in this new space. In location-based games the game activity takes place in a space where places may carry a meaning and participate in the game activity. In this case, we observe the co-existence of three interrelated spaces: the game space, as defined by the "magic circle" notion, the digital space and the physical space (see fig. 1). Technology and mobility interrelate the three spaces, by augmenting the physical space and supporting the game mechanics.

3

Course structure

The course introduces the key characteristics of location-based mobile games. The underlying idea is that with these games the players interact with the real world, perform physical activities situated in the real world and relate knowledge with places rich in historic value. As noted in a survey of location-based games (Avouris and Yiannoutsou, 2012), these games are conceived as tools that employ the fun of a game and engagement with a specific location. They may be played indoors (e.g. in a museum) or outdoors (e.g. in a city center). In this course examples of such games will be given, with special emphasis to games relating to cultural heritage.

In the second part of the course, the challenge of designing location based mobile games will be discussed. A design framework is presented and a set of guidelines that may inform design of such games. This includes a set of design patterns, which were extracted from game design workshops. Several workshops for designing locationbased games were organized and the designers were asked to generate game concepts for a hypothetical location-based mobile game, where the players should engage simultaneously with the real-world but also with its game-world counterparts.

Designing a location-based mobile game is a complex undertaking. Besides considerations about game mechanics and fun, which are complex in themselves, other aspects such as interaction between the players, the physical location and objects, expected learning outcome, etc. make this endeavor even more difficult. Several design patterns to be used in the conceptualization of location-based mobile games are presented. These are building blocks or partial solutions that can support the generation of game concepts. As to be useful design tools, the design patterns aim to strike a balance between the aim to give designers enough options and to avoid prescribing static solutions.

Next, in the third part of the course examples from location-based games developed by the course organizers will be briefly presented and discussed, in terms of concepts, design and implementation decisions, including MuseumScrabble, RebelsVsSpies, Taggling, etc.

In the final part of the game the participants are asked to answer the following question: What are the components of a game? A good way to address this question is through an example. This question aims at grounding the design process in the deconstruction of existing games and to start thinking about a game in terms of its main components.

The participants of the hands-on activity follow a 'scenario' where they become game designers. In this scenario: The aim is the design of a game where the players move in specific site, use smartphones to interact with objects, buildings, locations in it, interact with each other forming teams, collaborating, competing or antagonizing, have fun and enjoy the game, learn about the site.

The participants form groups of 3-5 and receive the relevant material [11]. The activity is structured in two symmetrical phases. Each phase is followed by a presentation. The aim of the first phase is to familiarize the team members with the material. The actual design work is expected to happen in phase two.

Phase one (10 minutes) A rapporteur is chosen from each team. Each team formulates an idea about a location based mobile game using the Worksheet 1 to describe it Presentation (10 minutes) The rapporteur explains and pitches the idea in a very short presentation (1 minute per team) Very fast! Phase two (10 minutes) The teams get back and improve, detail and modify their games. They can use any of the other teams' ideas Final presentation and discussion. The rapporteur explains and pitches the final idea in a short presentation. Discussion is encouraged

  (a) Introduction to key notions of location-based games, (b) A design framework for these games including design patterns from previous games, (c) Examples of games and (d) Hands on experience with ideation of a location based game for a specific location.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Technology links different spaces: game, digital and physical (Avouris et al. 2013)


Asad Ali Junaid
email: asadjunaid@gmail.com

The Science behind User Experience Design

Keywords: User Experience, Empirical Research, Scientific Methods, UX, Experimental Design, Logic, Data Collection and Analysis, Data Representation, Measuring User Performance, Biases in Research

Planning and conducting User Experience (UX) activities in a structured and scientific manner has many advantages. It is important that UX Professionals understand the scientific basis of UX methods and leverage them to enhance the UX of the application being designed. It would also be easier for the UX designer to get a buy-in from the stakeholders if his design recommendations are based in scientific logic and whetted by supporting data. In this course, UX relevant social sciences based scientific concepts and methods will be presented to the audience in a way which is simple to understand and easily to assimilate.

Introduction

The underlying purpose of employing a scientific method in the User Experience profession is to make sure we, as User Experience (UX) Practitioners, have not been misled into thinking we have deduced something which is far from correct while making a design/ process recommendation which in turn would adversely impact the application being built. In such situations, the credibility of the UX designer in an organization would be affected while the confidence of the stakeholders in the UX profession itself would erode.

Planning and conducting UX activities in a structured and scientific manner has many advantages. The primary end user would be the direct beneficiary -the application being built would be the designed and built for the user's ease-of-use while the stakeholders would also see the maximum returns on their investment in UX. The cost of development would also decrease drastically due to reduced rework when the primary end user has been thoroughly understood; screens have been logically designed and have been empirically tested by a UX designer.

It is important that UX Professionals understand the scientific basis of UX methods enough and leverage them for improving the UX of the application being designed. When the UX process and design recommendations are based on empirical evidence and irrefutable data, then they will be received well.

By learning how to scientifically conduct UX studies, methodically analyzing data collected during such studies and providing sound design recommendations, the UX Professional will not just increase his own credibility within the organization but he will be easily able to evangelize and implement UX processes with a fair degree of ease across the organization.

Based on a deeper understanding of UX relevant scientific concepts and processes, the UX Designer would be able to better plan and conduct UX activities such as strategizing UX approach for solving the specific design problem, planning for and setting timelines of UX deliverables, planning and conducting User Research, creating and validating Personas, Heuristic Analysis of existing applications, planning and conducting Usability Tests, analyzing data obtained from User Research and Usability Tests and subsequently designing or proposing re-designs of applications/ products.

Course Content and Schedule

My intent is to present some UX relevant social science based scientific concepts and process to the audience in a way which is simple to understand and easily to assimilate. With the knowledge and expertise gained from this course, the UX Professional would be able to take their UX practice a notch higher and by making recommendations which are scientific and data driven -in other words, recommendations which are credible and irrefutable. I will cover the essential fundamentals of the course in two 80 minute sessions.

Background of Attendees

The course would be interest to i. UX Practitioners who want to understand the scientific basis behind the profession and to also understand how to logically and scientifically base their arguments for the designs or design process they will be proposing to stakeholders coming from varied backgrounds. ii.

Project Managers who want to get insights on the decision making process of UX practitioners and also to understand the importance of the scientific methodology behind some of the UX processes. iii.

Designers who are from a graphic design or content writing background and are not familiar with the core fundamentals and the empirical origins of the User Experience Profession iv.

The course would not be useful for someone who is well versed with the methodologies of social science research

Presentation Format

A set of presentation decks will be used to deliver the course contents to the audience. I am envisioning a workshop model with mini assignments and experiments within the course content to enable the audience to grasp the core takeaways from the course.

Audience Size

Anything around or above 20 participants would be a good audience size.

Instructor Bio

Asad Ali Junaid is currently with a US based MNC as a Sr. User Experience Designer designing their retail analytics and enterprise business products. Junaid has more than ten years of industry experience in User Experience and Interaction Design across organizations such as ABB Corporate Research, IBM, Intel and Human Factors International.

Junaid has a MS Degree in Human Factors Psychology and is a Certified Usability Analyst (CUA). Junaid also has a MS Degree in Electrical Engineering as well and brings a multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving.

Junaid loves to teach and believes that the best way to learn something is to teach it. He regularly conducts a one credit course in HCI & UX for the IT Department of PSG Tech, Coimbatore. Junaid has taught UX Design & HCI at the organizations he has previously worked at as well.

In order for the organization to compete most effectively in the marketplace, Creativity must be a vital skill of its employees. Junaid has also conducted numerous workshops on Creative Thinking.

Junaid is the Co-Founder of StyleMyFit Pvt. Ltd. which makes Made-to-Measure Apparels to complement body type & personal styles -with the convenience of ecommerce. Junaid is also the author of an epistolary novel -'And We Remained'told through emails and first person accounts of events.

  The course content is detailed below:  Origins and background of User Experience Design (20 mins) o Introduce the audience to the principles of Human Factors and Human Computer Interaction which were precursors of the field of User Experience Design. This would enable the user to understand the origins and the scientific rationale behind some of the methods employed in UX Design  Principles of Applied psychology in relevance to UX Design (80 mins) o Introduce the audience to concepts of Cognitive Psychology, the Information Processing model, Memory, Sensation, Perception, Affordance and Attention in the contexts of Human Computer Interaction with specific examples.  The concept of Empirical Research and takeaways for UX Design (40 mins) One of the goals Data Science is to communicate insights obtained from data gathering and analysis in the form of simple stories/visualizations that a layman can understand and come to conclusions on. Conducting UX activities in a structured and scientific manner yields plenty of data with invaluable insights hidden within it. When this data is cleaned up and visualized in a way which makes sense, deep awareness of end-user preferences and behaviors come to light. The last module focuses on Data Visualization Methods where insights obtained from analysis of data can be represented in a way which the stakeholders can easily derive meaning out of.

	o Introduce the concepts of Empirical Research, Hypothesis, Theory, Law,
	Experimental Design, Measuring Human Performance and Empirical
	Methods of Data collection & analysis.
	 Data Science in the context of UX (20 mins)
	o


Debasish Biswas
email: debasish@moonraft.com

Nihal Pimpale

Konark Ashara
email: konark@moonraft.com

Connected by Design -Our learnings from designing digital profiler journeys IDFC Bank Digital Experience

Keywords: Banking, Profilers, Fintech, Digitization, Finance 1

This case study presents the key learnings derived from the twentyuser profiler journeys designed by Moonraft Innovation Labs for IDFC Bank. These profiler journeys were created to tackle challenges faced by banks in improving user engagement and simplifying data collection processes through digital experiences. These insights can be applied to create similar experiences for other sectors. The learnings are presented with examples..

Introduction

IDFC Bank is the 83rd Bank to enter a highly competitive and cluttered financial services landscape in India. Customers generally perceive banking as complex, frustrating and slow. Most private banks have adopted digitisation as a way forward to try and mitigate these issues. IDFC Bank's business model is based on a low physical footprint and a larger digital footprint. Traditionally banks have been using physical branches or relationship managers as the primary touch point for customer engagement. Going digital required these interactions to be seamlessly translated on to the digital medium. There were three major observations based on research conducted by an external consultant for IDFC Bank.

• Financial know-how is relatively new for masses in India. This creates a perception that financial planning is complex.

• Banks tend to aggressively push all their products without understanding the needs of the customer. This creates a general sense of mistrust among user towards the Bank.

• Banking involves a lot of form filling and documentation in the product purchase process. Customers need assistance during these processes.

We created a series of experiences addressing these observations. Leveraging digital to impart financial education to customers was imperative so that they could make an informed purchase decision. First, understanding the user's needs and aspirations and then recommending the most relevant solutions for them. We also helped in redesigning to enhance the form filling and documentation experience. We call these experiences profiler journeys.

Learnings from the Profiler Journeys

An individual's life revolves around his lifestyle & needs. An individual spends a lot of time browsing through services and products on a banking website and trying to understand them. We created profilers journeys to address this. These are short digital experiences created to understand the user's need and provide relevant recommendations and financial education through story-telling. We created over 20 journeys for various solutions from IDFC Bank. Following are some of the key learnings from designing these journeys.

Input driven persuasion

Profiling requires form filling which involves several inputs and multiple steps. In order to persuade and motivate the user to keep providing information, we needed to bring out the value in their actions. We did this by showing the user relevant information for each step. This information was persuasive and insightful in nature. For example: In the insurance journey, a user gets a quote for his life cover in the first step itself. For the next steps, if the user chooses to secure his family and their health, the cover amount increases with each step. This creates reasoning to why that extra cover is required and user is persuaded to finish all the steps. As shown in example in Figure 1.

Metaphoric interactive graphs

For banking solutions like wealth management, that needed educating the user about the investment market behaviours, risk capacity, etc. it was necessary to use stock market based statistical graphs. For each personality of investor the predicted investment growth graph will be different. These graphs can be difficult to understand for a new user. New users don't understand which personality type they belong to. We used real life metaphors to simplify the understanding of these personalities and the graphs.

The actual meaning of the graphs is revealed to the user as they start interacting with he graph and explore how different personality types affect investment graphs. As shown in example in Figure 2.

Highlighted recommendations

Most financial products have several variations. For example there can be multiple variations of home loan solutions recommended to a customer. In such cases clearly stating which solution out of the bunch is the most relevant helps user in making a selection. We created tags of "must haves" and "good to have" to create this distinction. As shown in example in Figure 3.

Story based form filling

Forms are usually straight forward with more focus on keeping content scan-able and crisp. But users see banking solutions as a way to fulfill their life needs and aspirations. Therefore, the form filling should reflect these emotional connects between the product and user's need. Using story based content for form filling with a definite beginning, middle and conclusive end would help users connect with the solution through out the journey. Users would be able to associate with input flows and would be interested till the end of the journey to see the conclusion.

Visual language that connects

We focused on creating a visual language to resonate with the sentiments of the users. We wanted to breakaway from the traditional image of a bank. From serious and transactional to more playful and familiar. We created over 500+ icons and illustrations for the IDFC bank. These were based on being quietly Indian, with the essential Indian ness but not being loud about it. These were inspired by our rich folk art and diverse culture. As shown in example in Figure 4.

Impact on user engagement

Although most of the journeys have gone live recently, the initial bunch of data metrics show a marked improvement in user engagement compared to industry benchmarks. In this short span of time, IDFC Bank has one of the lowest drop-off rates as per industry benchmarks. Of the total user registrations, majority were through these profiler journeys offline.

Fig. 1 .

 1 Fig. 1. Input and output in personal insurance journey for desktop web

Fig. 2 .

 2 Fig. 2. Interactive graph with daring adventurer as personality type

Fig. 3 .

 3 Fig. 3. Essential and good to have investment goals for a given user

Fig. 4 .

 4 Fig. 4. Few examples of icons from the quietly Indian set