Although habits are a well-researched topic within psychology, habits enacted at the workplace received limited attention in the organizational literature. In this article we examine habits that employees show at the workplace. Because workplace habits are not always functional for performance or affective outcomes, and because employees themselves may regard specific habits as undesirable, it is important to identify ways of how employees can abandon such unwanted habits. We report findings from a daily-survey study (N = 145 persons) in which we examined if self-regulatory processes predict disengagement from undesirable habits and engagement in more desirable alternative behaviors. Multilevel path analysis showed that day-specific implementation intentions and day-specific vigilant monitoring were negatively related to day-specific habitual behavior and positively related to day-specific alternative behaviors, both in the morning and in the afternoon. Analysis of follow-up data (N = 126 persons) showed that change in habit strength was stable over a 2-month period, suggesting that implementation intentions, vigilant monitoring, and the associated enactment of alternative behavior indeed may help to disengage from unwanted habits, particularly with respect to task-related habits and when consistency in vigilant monitoring is high. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

In contrast to the wide-spread use of 6-DOF pointing devices, free-hand user interfaces in Immersive Virtual Environments (IVE) are non-intrusive. However, for gesture interfaces, the definition of trigger signals is challenging. The use of mechanical devices, dedicated trigger gestures, or speech recognition are often used options, but each comes with its own drawbacks. In this paper, we present an alternative approach, which allows to precisely trigger events with a low latency using microphone input. In contrast to speech recognition, the user only blows into the microphone. The audio signature of such blow events can be recognized quickly and precisely. The results of an user study show that the proposed method allows to successfully complete a standard selection task and performs better than expected against a standard interaction device, the Flystick

Gathering qualitative user data in a user-centered design process is one of the very early steps to create interactive systems. However, generating structured models from qualitative data towards descriptions that can be used for the implementation of interactive systems and prototypes raises various challenges, such as a strong influence of the modeler's knowledge and their interpretation of the gathered qualitative data. Introducing the modeler's bias may result in a system implementation which does not fully represent the information provided in the original qualitative data, generating an unwanted gap between what the user needs and what the system provides. To address this challenge, in this paper we present a structured and manual transformation method, which enables a modeler to create BPMN models from interview data by reducing the modeler's individual influence on the resulting BPMN model. We evaluate this approach in the context of the implementation of persuasive systems, which should support changing unwanted work-related habits. Therefore, we conducted unstructured interviews with office workers, thinking aloud interviews, in which we asked office workers to imagine a situation where they showed an unwanted work-related habit and to describe this habit together with an alternative behavior. In a quantitative experimental study, we then asked study participants to create BPMN models either with or without our new transformation method. Our analyses showed that when using our method, different participants created very similar BPMN models of the habits, even with little training. We conclude that the major contribution of our work is that the presented method can be applied to the creation of structured models from unstructured interview data. This method that makes use of rich interview data is suitable for the design and implementation of interactive systems.

Making music by blowing on bottles is fun but challenging. We introduce a novel 3D user interface to play songs on virtual bottles. For this purpose the user blows into a microphone and the stream of air is recreated in the virtual environment and redirected to virtual bottles she is pointing to with her fingers. This is easy to learn and subsequently opens up opportunities for quickly switching between bottles and playing groups of them together to form complex melodies. Furthermore, our interface enables the customization of the virtual environment, by means of moving bottles, changing their type or filling level.

In this paper, we present the results of a user study with a bimanual haptic setup. The goal of the experiment was to evaluate if Guiard's theory of the bimanual frame of reference can be applied to interaction tasks in virtual environments (VE) with haptic rendering. This theory proposes an influence of the non-dominant hand (NDH) on the dominant hand (DH). The experiment was conducted with multiple trials under two different conditions: bimanual and unimanual. The interaction task in this scenario was a sequence of pointing, alignment and docking sub-tasks for the dominant hand. In the bimanual condition, an asynchronous pointing task was added for the non-dominant hand. This additional task was primarily designed to bring the non-dominant hand closer to the other hand and thus enable the creation of a frame of reference. Our results show the potential of this task design extension (with NDH utilization). Task completion times are significantly lower in the bimanual condition compared to the unimanual case, without significant impact on overall precision. Furthermore, the bimanual condition shows better mean accuracy over several measures, e.g., lateral displacement and penetration depth. Additionally, subject performance was not only compared for all participants, but also between subgroups: medical vs. non-medical and gamer vs. non-gamer. User preference for a bimanual system over a unimanual system has been indicated with a post-test questionnaire.

We propose the use of a Virtual Tour to substitute in-person visits to a manufacturing plant for a lecture on Enterprise Productivity at the School of Business Administration at our University. Traditionally, during this lecture, students are required to visit a production site to observe its process and apply their knowledge in a real-life scenario. However, finding businesses that are willing to participate and offer the right learning conditions has become a challenge. This situation is now worse due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we present a prototype of a virtual tour of an assembly line in a simulated environment, where students can explore and learn about the manufacturing process of car seats. We performed a mixed method user study, with quantitative and qualitative data, to determine whether the application can help learn the intended concepts and improve the learning experience and motivation of students. Results show that the use of the virtual tour application increased motivation in learning.