The growth of Internet-distributed TV services has transformed video consumption, enhancing the level of control that viewers have over what they watch. Along with the release of entire seasons of programming at once, this has led to the phenomenon of ‘binge-watching’, in which several episodes of a program are viewed in one sitting. This article presents the results of a novel exploratory study focused on 40 Netflix viewing sessions from 11 millennials in their homes. Methodologically, we employed a novel mixed-methods approach that combines objective data (collected through a browser extension) and subjective data (collected via questionnaires completed before and after viewing). This novel approach allowed us to describe the binge-watcher’s experience in a holistic fashion. Results suggest that binge-watching is an individual activity mainly performed at the end of the day to relax, for boredom relief purposes, or for escapism. Furthermore, a binge-watching session lasts for an average of 2 h and 10 min, and variations on binge-watchers’ affective states were identified after Netflix exposure. Participants’ levels of valence (unhappy–happy) significantly decreased after binge-watching; their positive affect values increased primarily after watching sci-fi, while their negative affect values decreased after watching comedy and slightly increased after watching drama. However, the levels of arousal (relaxed–stimulated) remained the same. This study extends our current understanding of binge-watching in terms of viewer motivations, how it affects their viewing experiences, and participants’ subjective affective states. The investigation contributes, thus, to a relatively new domain of research concerned with the understanding of binge-watching behavior of serialized TV fiction.

Exploratory search confront users with challenges in expressing search intents as the current search interfaces require investigating result listings to identify search directions, iterative typing, and reformulating queries. We present the design of Exploration Wall, a touch-based search user interface that allows incremental exploration and sense-making of large information spaces by combining entity search, flexible use of result entities as query parameters, and spatial configuration of search streams that are visualized for interaction. Entities can be flexibly reused to modify and create new search streams, and manipulated to inspect their relationships with other entities. Data comprising of task-based experiments comparing Exploration Wall with conventional search user interface indicate that Exploration Wall achieves significantly improved recall for exploratory search tasks while preserving precision. Subjective feedback supports our design choices and indicates improved user satisfaction and engagement. Our findings can help to design user interfaces that can effectively support exploratory search on touch devices.

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Humans perceive different objects, scenes or places using all their senses. Our sensory richness also plays an important role for creative activities. Humans also recall those sensory experiences in order to spark creativity, e.g. while writing a text. This paper presents a study with 100 students, divided in groups, that explores the effect of auditory and olfactory cues and their combination during a creative writing exercise. Our results provide useful insights suggesting that olfactory cues have an important role in the creative process of users and even when this type of cues are combined with auditory cues. We believe, that this type of modalities should gain more relevance on the development of creativity support tools and environments for supporting the creative writing process.

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