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Over the years a consensus has developed that involving users directly in the software development process can lead to more useful and usable systems. This has found its clearest expression in the Participatory Design (PD) movement. However, a limitation of PD is that it has primarily focused on project stakeholders being co-located, whereas in recent years we are starting to see software development projects involve more distributed collaborations. This workshop is aimed at researchers and practitioners with an interest to overcome the challenges of performing PD in distributed design teams. Several critical issues need examination in order to understand the usefulness and constraints of distributed participatory design (DPD).

Abstract. We investigate the use of 2 tagging technologies: Near Field Communication (NFC) and 2-dimensional barcodes. Our investigation combined a field trial and interview based study with an experimental evaluation. The field trial focused on users' experience of the usability of NFC for a range of trial services, users' perceptions of NFC use in their daily life context, and users' suggestions for potential applications of NFC. The tags were embedded in a variety of postcards, table-top signs and posters. The experimental evaluation compared the ease of use of NFC and 2D barcodes, operationalised in terms of time taken to read a specified sequence of tags on posters. We found that for untrained users the 2D barcodes were quicker to use than the NFC tags but that training significantly improved users' performance with the NFC tags while having no effect on their performance with the barcodes.

We have developed a gesture input system that provides a common interaction technique across mobile, wearable and ubiquitous computing devices of diverse form factors. In this paper, we combine our gestural input technique with speech output and test whether or not the absence of a visual display impairs usability in this kind of multimodal interaction. This is of particular relevance to mobile, wearable and ubiquitous systems where visual displays may be restricted or unavailable. We conducted the evaluation using a prototype for a system combining gesture input and speech output to provide information to patients in a hospital Accident and Emergency department. A group of participants was instructed to access various services using gestural inputs. The services were delivered by automated speech output. Throughout their tasks, these participants could see a visual display on which a GUI presented the available services and their corresponding gestures. Another group of participants performed the same tasks but without this visual display. It was predicted that the participants without the visual display would make more incorrect gestures and take longer to perform correct gestures than the participants with the visual display. We found no significant difference in the number of incorrect gestures made. We also found that participants with the visual display took longer than participants without it. It was suggested that for a small set of semantically distinct services with memorable and distinct gestures, the absence of a GUI visual display does not impair the usability of a system with gesture input and speech output.

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