This demonstration presents AMARA, a novel interactive system to help novice art enthusiasts browse online art collections. Currently being developed for the Indianapolis Museum of Art website, the system uses an embedded interactive agent who asks users a series of simple and straightforward multiple-choice questions regarding users' current feelings, preferences, and interests in art. The answers to each question are mapped to social tags, which are then used to retrieve and display relevant artworks the user may find interesting or appealing. Using AMARA, users can easily browse or search through online art collections without having to use a traditional keyword search, which requires extensive knowledge of art terminology or advanced subject expertise. Thus, AMARA was designed to enhance users' enjoyment and engagement with online art collections and assist users in discovering their known and unknown preferences in art.

While traditional HCI research emphasizes usability based on models of cognition, user experience (UX) focuses on affect and emotion through the provision of positive interactive experiences. Providing affective cues, such as apologetic on-screen display messages, appears to be a way to influence users' affective states as well as their perceptions toward an information retrieval system. A study was designed to determine whether users' affect and perceptions differ between three types of systems: neutral, apologetic, and non-apologetic. Our results revealed that the users perceived the apologetic system as more aesthetically appealing and usable than the neutral or nonapologetic system. The result also showed that users' frustration was the lowest when using the apologetic system. We discuss the implications of these results in designing a more experience-centered system.

In the context of blogs, online trust can play an important role in connecting the author and readers. Trust is known to be one of the primary psychological aspects influencing online user profiling. In blogs, trust is reflected by how much personal information a user reveals. Trusting someone or something may be an entirely different matter in the United States than it is in China or Korea because trust affects actions that could be highly dependent on users' respective cultural context. This paper presents the preliminary results of our cross-cultural research on blogs and online trust in U.S., Chinese, and Korean cultures. Results suggest that bloggers from the U.S. reveal more personal information in self-reported user profiles than bloggers from China and Korea. However, similar percentages of U.S. and Korean bloggers are willing to reveal their locations and hobbies, and post self-photos. Additionally, we found interesting cultural insights regarding gender, age, location, hobbies, and self-photos in the user profiles of blogs across the three cultures.

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