Simon Perrault

Jie Gao, Pin Sym Foong, Yifan Yang et al.

During the COVID-19 epidemic in China, millions of workers in tech companies had to start working from home (WFH). The change was sudden, unexpected and companies were not ready for it. Additionally, it was also the first time that WFH was experienced on such a large scale. We used the opportunity to describe the effect of WFH at scale for a sustained period of time. As the lockdown was easing, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 participants from China working in tech companies. While at first, WFH was reported as a pleasant experience with advantages, e.g. flexible schedule, more time with family, over time, this evolved into a rather negative experience where workers start working all day, every day and feel a higher workload despite the actual workload being reduced. We discuss these results and how they could apply for other extreme circumstances and to help improve WFH in general.

Pavithren V S Pakianathan, Simon Perrault

Over the past few years, older adults in Singapore have been massively connecting to the Internet using Smartphone. However due to the ever-changing nature of Technology and Cybersecurity landscape, an older adult's limited technical and Privacy and Security (P & S) knowledge, experience and declining cognitive and physical abilities puts them at higher risks. Furthermore mainstream smartphone applications, which are generally not designed with older adults in mind, could result in mismatched mental models thereby creating usability issues. We interviewed 10 older adults above 65 and 10 adults assisting them based in Singapore to investigate how smartphone P & S can be redesigned inclusively by addressing the needs of older adults and people who support them. Our results show that socio-cultural factors affected the process of getting or providing P & S help, culture and attitude affected learning behaviours and older adults expressed heterogeneous P & S preferences based on contextual factors and level of convenience, however there are opportunities for the mechanisms to be senior-friendly. Due to the complex relationship between an older adult's milieu and technology, we aim to utilize a technology probe to investigate further and contribute towards an inclusive P & S model.

Katherine Fennedy, Sylvain Malacria, Hyowon Lee et al.

Touch-based devices, despite their mainstream availability, do not support a unified and efficient command selection mechanism, available on every platform and application. We advocate that hotkeys, conventionally used as a shortcut mechanism on desktop computers, could be generalized as a command selection mechanism for touch-based devices, even for keyboard-less applications. In this paper, we investigate the performance and usage of soft keyboard shortcuts or hotkeys (abbreviated SoftCuts) through two studies comparing different input methods across sitting, standing and walking conditions. Our results suggest that SoftCuts not only are appreciated by participants but also support rapid command selection with different devices and hand configurations. We also did not find evidence that walking deters their performance when using the Once input method.