Questionnaires are among the most common research tools in virtual reality (VR) evaluations and user studies. However, transitioning from virtual worlds to the physical world to respond to VR experience questionnaires can potentially lead to systematic biases. Administering questionnaires in VR (inVRQs) is becoming more common in contemporary research. This is based on the intuitive notion that inVRQs may ease participation, reduce the Break in Presence (BIP) and avoid biases. In this paper, we perform a systematic investigation into the effects of interrupting the VR experience through questionnaires using physiological data as a continuous and objective measure of presence. In a user study (n=50), we evaluated question-asking procedures using a VR shooter with two different levels of immersion. The users rated their player experience with a questionnaire either inside or outside of VR. Our results indicate a reduced BIP for the employed inVRQ without affecting the self-reported player experience.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376144
A common practice in HCI research is to conduct a survey to understand the generalizability of findings from smaller-scale qualitative research. These surveys are typically deployed to convenience samples, on low-cost platforms such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk or Survey Monkey, or to more expensive market research panels offered by a variety of premium firms. Costs can vary widely, from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the platform used. We set out to understand the accuracy of ten different survey platforms/panels compared to ground truth data for a total of 6,007 respondents on 80 different aspects of demographic and behavioral questions. We found several panels that performed significantly better than others on certain topics, while different panels provided longer and more relevant open-ended responses. Based on this data, we highlight the benefits and pitfalls of using a variety of survey distribution options in terms of the quality, efficiency, and representative nature of the respondents and the types of responses that can be obtained.
Questionnaires are among the most common research tools in virtual reality (VR) user studies. Transitioning from virtuality to reality for giving self-reports on VR experiences can lead to systematic biases. VR allows to embed questionnaires into the virtual environment which may ease participation and avoid biases. To provide a cohesive picture of methods and design choices for questionnaires in VR (inVRQ), we discuss 15 inVRQ studies from the literature and present a survey with 67 VR experts from academia and industry. Based on the outcomes, we conducted two user studies in which we tested different presentation and interaction methods of inVRQs and evaluated the usability and practicality of our design. We observed comparable completion times between inVRQs and questionnaires outside VR (nonVRQs) with higher enjoyment but lower usability for \inVRQs. These findings advocate the application of inVRQs and provide an overview of methods and considerations that lay the groundwork for inVRQ design.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376260
Personas are a well-known technique in human computer interaction. However, there is a lack of rigorous empirical research evaluating personas relative to other methods. In this 34-participant experiment, we compare a persona system and an analytics system, both using identical user data, for efficiency and effectiveness for a user identification task. Results show that personas afford faster task completion than the analytics system, as well as outperforming analytics with significantly higher user identification accuracy. Qualitative analysis of think-aloud transcripts shows that personas have other benefits regarding learnability and consistency. However, the analytics system affords insights and capabilities that personas cannot due to inherent design differences. Findings support the use of personas to learn about users, empirically confirming some of the stated benefits in the literature, while also highlighting the limitations of personas that may necessitate the use of accompanying methods.
Those who design gesture recognizers and user interfaces often use data collection applications that enable users to comfortably produce gesture training samples. In contrast, games present unique contexts that impact cognitive load and have the potential to elicit rapid gesticulations as players react to dynamic conditions, which can result in high gesture form variability. However, the extent to which these gestures differ is presently unknown. To this end, we developed two games with unique mechanics, Follow the Leader (FTL) and Sleepy Town, as well as a standard data collection application. We collected gesture samples from 18 participants across all conditions for gestures of varying complexity, and through an analysis using relative, global, and distribution coverage measures, we confirm significant differences between conditions. We discuss the implications of our findings, and show that our FTL design is closer to being an ecologically valid data collection protocol with low implementation complexity.