Usability and User Interface Design
New papers in usability and user interface design, the code and data they release, and the open problems their authors admit. Rebuilt every day from OpenAlex and arXiv.
New papers
User Experience/User Interface (UX/UI) design as the backbone of web-based climate service development
Design practices are often undervalued in climate service development.
The Impact of Time Pressure on Perceptions of Difficulty in an Automation-Supported Task
As automation progressively becomes integrated into decision-making environments, understanding why users fail to engage automated systems optimally remains crucial.
Design Principles and Measurement Frameworks for Human-Centered AI and Human-AI Interaction: A Systematic Review
Human-centered AI (HCAI) and human-AI interaction (HAX) are increasingly important as AI adoption expands across high-stakes domains.
Ocean Wave 2027: Your Network AI Zooming every Traffic Bit and the Future of Software Ergonomics
With the evolutions of deep machine learning techniques you may have noticed high success to recognize your fingerprint or your photos on your Android device, but you are surely complaining sincere reader as many, that the AI buzzing, has deceived methodology to encourage better ergonomics…
From Design Principles to Practice: Validation of a UX Design Checklist for Affective Conversational Agents in Mental Well-Being
University students' psychological well-being is a critical public health concern, creating demand for digital interventions that are both safe and effective.
Helix: Humans and several AI minds in one room, and one colleague who can be reached wherever the work is: in team chat, by voice, and in a Teams call
Humans and several AI minds in one room, and one colleague who can be reached wherever the work is: in team chat, by voice, and in a Teams call.
Content Adaptations and Usability Improvements in a Brazilian Digital Mental Health Platform: Lessons Learned from Iterative User-Centered Research
Introduction: Digital mental health interventions are especially relevant in low- and middle-income countries, where access to face-to-face care is limited.
User Experience and Trust in AI-Powered Virtual Assistants
This paper presents a conceptual study of user experience and trust inAI-powered virtual assistants.
Aesthetics in form and Function: Ergonomic Analysis of Juice Glassware
Glassware serves both functional and experiential roles in juice service, where design influences usability, visual appeal, and perceived capacity.
Project Genesis: The Sovereign Multi-Avatar Cognitive Mesh, Elder-Vocal Synthesis, and Biomimetic Peer-to-Peer Interface Protocol
Short Description (For Repository Records & Social Indexing) An open-hardware cognitive interface framework detailing the "Old Soul" vocal synthesis and multi-avatar peer-to-peer cognitive mesh designed to bridge human veteran intuition with multi-physics transit automation networks…
Application Of The Delone & Mclean Model On The Influence Of System Quality Of The "Kampus Kita Mahasiswa" Application On User SatisfactionA Study On Students Of The Faculty Of Vocational Studies, Airlangga University
Academic services at universities now rely on mobile apps, including Airlangga University’s “Kampus Kita Mahasiswa.” Initial observations of Google Play reviews reveal technical complaints such as login failures, QR code attendance issues, and slow app response times.
The Usability of Ranked Choice Voting in Digital Ballot Formats
ObjectiveThree digital ranked choice voting ballots were investigated to assess the impact of formatting on usability.BackgroundRanked choice voting (RCV) is a ballot format that allows voters to rank candidate choices in order of preference.
Rethinking Culture as Infrastructure: A Boundary Object for Diversity in HCI
Meanwhile, HCI developed more politically precise vocabularies.Feminist HCI foregrounded pluralism, embodiment, participation, and positionality [1]; postcolonial computing examined empire, development, and unequal epistemic authority [2].Decolonial, more-thanhuman, data justice, and planetary…
Right Click, Wrong Box: Grading GUI Grounding by What a Click Does
Leading GUI grounders score 93 to 96% on ScreenSpot-v2, and reported gaps between new and prior models are about a point.
Developing a Remote Operations Center for Uncrewed and Autonomously-Capable Maritime Surface Ships
Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) are increasingly enabled by advances in automation, autonomy, network connectivity and shoreside support systems.
The Engagement Advantage of Interactive Flipbook Interfaces over Static PDFs: A Synthesis of Behavioral Metrics, Cognitive Mechanisms, and Client-Side Rendering Architectures (2024–2026)
Static PDF documents remain the dominant format for catalogs, reports, training materials, and marketing assets, yet empirical engagement data consistently show large performance gaps relative to interactive page-flipping (“flipbook”) interfaces.
A Structured Mixed-Methods Workflow for User-Centred Digital Mental Health Platform Design
This study presents a structured mixed-methods workflow that integrates participatory co-design activities with a complementary quantitative prototype evaluation to support the formative development of digital mental health platforms.
Flowcharts as thinking and communication tools
Abstract This paper presents an example of using flowcharts as ‘thinking tools’ to understand complex processes and as ‘communication tools’ to convey them to citizens.
Explainable Interface Design for Human–AI Collaboration in Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy for Head and Neck Cancer Surgery: Mixed Methods Study (Preprint)
BACKGROUND Confocal laser endomicroscopy (CLE) enables real-time, in vivo tissue assessment during head and neck cancer surgery, where the balance between oncological safety and functional preservation is particularly delicate.
Effects of Creative Thinking and Cognitive Flexibility on Continuance Intention to Use Generative AI: The Mediating Effect of Perceived Usefulness and the Moderating Effect of AI Ethical Awareness
This study examined the structural relationships among creative thinking, cognitive flexibility, perceived usefulness, and continuance intention to use generative AI among university students, focusing on the mediating effect of perceived usefulness and the moderating effect of AI ethical awareness.
Released code and data
Helix: Humans and several AI minds in one room, and one colleague who can be reached wherever the work is: in team chat, by voice, and in a Teams call
Repository document: https://github.com/coreyjames-ai/helix, mirrored at https://gitlab.com/coreyjames-ai/helix.
Right Click, Wrong Box: Grading GUI Grounding by What a Click Does
We release the probe, the outcome maps, the audit and every prediction.
Offline Document Workflows on Android: A Source-Level Study of PDF and Office Writers
The companion research code and selected Android source are available at https://github.com/ikbal-causyne/causyne-offline-document-workflows.
ABRA: Agent-Bound UI for Human-Agent Communication beyond Chat with Reusable Views
The code and demo video are available at https://github.com/megagonlabs/abra.
Diagnosing Personalization Failures in Mobile GUI Agents
Code and data are available at https://github.com/Zhixin-L/PrefDiag-Bench.
Kolab: Benchmarking Human-Agent Collaboration in Long-Horizon Workflows
To address this gap, we introduce Kolab, a new dataset of 115+ hours of screen recordings of 50 professionals from 40 occupations collaborating with agents on realistic, long-horizon problems.
Agent Pointed Context: letting a person point an AI agent at what they see, without sharing the screen
Version 2 (19 October 2026) makes the open implementation the reference implementation of the paper: Pulse (https://github.com/tineira/agent-pointed-context, MIT; live demo at https://apc.tineira.com; software DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23404049, v0.2.0 at 10.5281/zenodo.23474764), described in detail with its view, pin and presence mechanics, trimming, the wait loop, measurements, one filled row of a client-compatibility instrument, and a wire example as logged in one session; the private ledger where the pattern was first built becomes the origin (Section 5.10).
How GUI Agents Fail: GraceBench for Execution Stability Diagnosis
Code and data will be released on https://iaie-physicalai.github.io/GraceBench.
Italian Web Accessibility 2026: An Observational Analysis of 10,022 Domains and 34,641 Web Pages
Data and reproducibility The accompanying IWAS dataset is publicly available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23346985 The research pipeline, methodology, tests, and reproducibility documentation are available at: https://github.com/giovannimanetti11/italian-web-accessibility-study Project website and further reading Research project by PerseoDesign Research: https://perseodesign.com An Italian-language overview of the methodology, findings and limitations is available on the PerseoDesign blog: https://perseodesign.com/blog/studio-accessibilita-web-italiano-iwas-2026 Related research This study shares its original domain sampling frame with the Italian Web Security Study (IWSS): Paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21322437 Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21323346
GUIDÆTA
We also provide a Python framework (https://github.com/lenxn/apchis-guidaeta) for loading, filtering, and processing the data.
Open problems authors admit
Operative displacement and the psychology of smart product use
We outline three dimensions of operative displacement: process-outcome decoupling, effort conversion into supervisory load, and attentional recession and relational intensification, along with their psychological consequences and implications for future research.
Usability and Acceptability Assessment of a Physical Activity Just-In-Time Mobile Application for People with an Inflammatory Bowel Disease: Mixed Methods Study (Preprint)
Future research should assess feasibility, sustained engagement, and potential effects on physical activity and fatigue in larger, more diverse samples.
Auditory Contrast and Audio Control in WCAG 3: Proposed Requirements and Evidence
It reviews feasibility through loudness measurement (ITU-R BS.1770), broadcast clean audio and dialogue enhancement (ETSI TS 101 154), and web deployments, and notes that conformance testing of already-mixed audio remains an open question.
CoWriter: Guiding Methodological and Synergetic Human-LLM Co-Authoring
Overall, our results demonstrate that proactively engaging users through established human practices is beneficial for effective LLM-supported co-authoring, providing useful methodologies, techniques and insights for future research on collaborative agents.
Campus Bloom: A User-Centered Design of an Integrated Web-Based Personal Branding Platform for Students
Future work should validate the requirements with representative users and evaluate usability, accessibility, security, and operational feasibility.
Design Thinking–Driven Multi-Agent Method for Persona Generation
Initial application and evaluation results suggest that the proposed method can support scenario-grounded persona generation and early concept framing for human-centered design practice across collaborative design settings, while future work should further examine broader design contexts and stronger downstream specification support.
Looks Fine to Me: Understanding Oversight in Agentic Interactions
We discuss how studying oversight across multiple dimensions can support future work on timely, task-calibrated re-engagement.
Interface Design in Multi-Objective Decision Support System: An Exploratory Study on Cognitive Load, Visual Attention and Performance
By integrating behavioral and physiological measures, this study provides empirical support for user-centered interface design, highlighting personalization based on cognitive states as a potential direction for future research on performance in complex decision-making environments.
Beyond Self-Report: A Neurocognitive Approach to UX Evaluation of Greek Municipal Websites
Future research with larger, gender-balanced samples is needed to validate and extend these preliminary findings.
Diagnosing Usability Barriers and Conversion Quality Deficits: An Integrated Framework for Web Interface Evaluation
The contribution is therefore methodological - a reproducible, construct-grounded instrument answering a documented call for standardization -with criterion validation, AI-pipeline validation, and remediation effect testing reserved for future work.