Editorial

Dear reader,

the current issue presents a selection of papers from last year’s Mensch und Computer Conference. As in previous years, we asked the authors of MuC best papers to publish an extended version of their conference contribution in i-com, but this time decided to dedicate an entire issue to four highly-ranked MuC papers. This best-of selection from MuC is complemented by an extended version of the DeLFI 2016 best paper. The editors are considering dedicating one issue of the journal per year to high quality MuC papers, both to make these papers more widely available and to provide an additional incentive of bringing the best research to the conference.

First in this line-up of papers is a contribution by Sebastian Franken, Ulrich Norbisrath and Wolfgang Prinz, describing the sharing of search trails in collaborative contexts through a novel type of visualization. The paper focusses on a user study in which the authors compared their SearchTrails method against a condition where users were only given a written report providing information about the information to be searched. The study provided evidence for the advantage of the new technique. In the second paper, Adelka Niels and Monique Janneck investigate the question whether users’ evaluative judgements of systems depend on where they see the reasons for successful or unsuccessful interactions with the system, for example, whether they blame the system or themselves for failures experienced. In their study, the authors assess users’ attributions with respect to four different dimensions and relate them to the users’ rating of different devices and applications. The authors find correlations between the attributional dimensions and different usability-related metrics, in particular in the case of successful interactions.

Mateusz Dolata and Gerhard Schwabe report findings of a study addressing the impact of IT support in advisory service encounters. They investigate whether and how the use of a tablet and touch table application influences the communication between customers and human advisors in a financial consulting scenario in comparison to a paper-and-pen- condition. Their findings indicate that the temporal evolution of the client-advisor interaction is different in the two conditions, with more interaction later in the session following an initial “tuning in” phase when IT support is available. The fourth MuC paper by Sebastian Gross, Marcel Kliemannel, and Niels Pinkwart analyzes the use of a hierarchical visualization to improve orientation and navigation in resource spaces. Their system extracts terms from textual resources with subsequent clustering of the resources. Two different visualizations have been developed for visualizing and exploring these structures. While the differences between the two visualizations were found to be not significant, the overall findings indicate that using the visualizations might be more effective than standard web search.

The fifth paper in this issue is an extended version of one of the two DeLFI 2016 best papers. Marlene Karlapp and Wiebke Köhlmann present a two-dimensional tactile interface that allows blind users to more effectively participate in virtual classroom learning sessions. They present an architecture for extending an existing Braille device and report positive findings from a study with blind users. Finally, concluding this i-com issue, Daniel Ullrich discusses the interesting question of designing suitable robot personalities for different domains.

Jürgen Ziegler

Editor-in-Chief