Recently, in the commercial and entertainment sectors, we have seen increasing interest in incorporating chatbots into websites and apps, in order to assist customers and clients. In the academic area, chatbots are useful to provide some guidance and information about courses, admission processes and procedures, study programs, and scholarly services. However, these virtual assistants have limited mechanisms to suitably help the teaching and learning process, considering that these mechanisms should be advantageous for all the people involved. In this article, we design a model for developing a chatbot that serves as an extra-school tool to carry out academic and administrative tasks and facilitate communication between middle-school students and academic staff (e.g., teachers, social workers, psychologists, and pedagogues). Our approach is designed to help less tech-savvy people by offering them a familiar environment, using a conversational agent to ease and guide their interactions. The proposed model has been validated by implementing a multi-platform chatbot that provides both textual-based and voice-based communications and uses state-of-the-art technology. The chatbot has been tested with the help of students and teachers from a Mexican middle school, and the evaluation results show that our prototype obtained positive usability and user experience endorsements from such end-users.

Chatbots are artificial intelligence tools that interact with people in different contexts. A chatbot can be useful to streamline daily processes, serve customers 24 hours a day, provide information about classes, among other things. The appearance of new development technologies has made creating a chatbot an increasingly fast and straightforward process, bringing this kind of applications to people who had never considered using them before. However, this speed in development can lead to specific problems, many of them caused by the lack of usability evaluations. Heuristic usability evaluations are user interface review processes carried out by experts and are an essential part of any assessment process. To date, there are no heuristics to evaluate the usability of chatbots. Therefore, this work proposes five usability heuristics in chatbots that come from the experience developing this type of applications, as well as from a broad review of state of the art. The set of heuristics was tested using a case study with the help of five experts, who evaluated an education-oriented chatbot. The results revealed that, although the proposed heuristics need refinement, they are an excellent first step in broadening the horizon of usability evaluations in chatbots.

Microtransactions, small in-app purchases within virtual environments, have become increasingly prevalent in modern gaming, often leading to addictive behaviors and financial burdens, particularly among young male players. The potential consequences of such microtransactions within the metaverse extend beyond gaming, as they provide companies with unprecedented control over user experiences and the ability to capitalize personal data for targeted advertising and manipulative practices. This article presents a comprehensive framework for the ethical analysis and design of microtransactions in the metaverse to address these concerns. This three-dimensional framework explores Motivation, Engagement, and Fairness to evaluate the impact of microtransactions on user autonomy, social interactions, and overall fairness. Additionally, the paper conducts a running example on World of Warcraft to assess the alignment of its microtransaction design choices with the proposed ethical principles. By shedding light on these issues, this article aims to raise awareness among consumers, developers, and policymakers about the need for responsible practices, consumer protection, and privacy preservation in the metaverse. It emphasizes fostering collaboration and transparency to safeguard users from misuse while promoting a user-centric metaverse ecosystem.

Today, social networks are crucial commodities that allow people to share different contents and opinions. In addition to participation, the information shared within social networks makes them attractive, but success is also accompanied by a positive User eXperience (UX). Social networks must offer useful and well-designed user-tools, i.e., sets of widgets that allow interaction among users. To satisfy this requirement, Episodic User eXperience (EUX) yields reactions of users after having interacted with an artifact. Anticipated User eXperience (AUX) grants the designers the capacity to recollect users’ aspirations, assumptions, and needs in the initial development phase of an artifact. In this work, we collect UX perceived in both periods to contrast user expectations and experiences offered on social networks, in order to find elements that could improve the design of user-tools. We arrange a test where participants ($N=20$) designed prototypes on paper to solve tasks and then did the same tasks on online social networks. Both stages are assessed with the help of AttrakDiff, and then we analyze the results through t-tests. The results we obtained suggest that users are inclined towards pragmatic aspects of their user-tools expectations.

3D terrains used in digital animations and videogames are typically created by several collaborators with a single-user application, which constrains them to update the shared terrain from their PCs, using a turn-taking strategy. Moreover, collaborators have to visualize the terrain through 2D views, confusing novice users when conceiving its shape in 3D. In this article, we describe an architecture for collaborative applications, which allow co-located users to sketch a terrain using their mobile devices concurrently. Two interaction modes are supplied: the standard one and an augmented reality-based mode, which helps collaborators understand the 3D terrain shape. Using the painting with brushesparadigm, users can modify the terrain while visualizing its shape evolution through the camera of their devices. Work coordination is promoted by enriching the 3D space with each collaborator’s avatar, which provides awareness information about identity, location, and current action. We implemented a collaborative application from this architecture that was tested by groups of users, who assessed its hedonic and pragmatic qualities in both interaction modes and compared them with the qualities of a similar Web terrain editor. The results showed that the augmented reality mode of our prototype was considered more attractive and usable by the participants.