Category Archives: UX

A world full of emojis

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In 2010, a new trend emerged in electronic messages and web pages: emojis. There is an interesting journey behind these cute little images, and it is definitely worth to understand how and why they were initially created.

Emojis (less known as pictographs) are images encoded as text and exist in various genres: facial expressions , common objects , food , places ⛰️, activities ⛷, animals and most of what you can think of . The word comes from the Japanese 絵 (e ≅ picture) + 文字 (moji ≅ written character). 2823 emojis exist in total (as of today) and it is estimated that about 6 billion emojis are sent every single day. Continue reading →

An Introduction to Gamification in Human-Computer Interaction

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User experience (UX) is a field within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that studies the whole experience of a user with a product, system, or service. UX focuses on  issues such as usability, ergonomics, cognitive load, and affective experiences. However, in the last years, there is a particular growing interest in understanding users’ motivation to use a product, system, or service. This interest is spawned by observable low engagement rates: it is not enough to have a useful system, one needs to also motivate and engage users in it. One possible solution to this comes from a field of study is called gamification or gameful design1, because its main inspiration comes from understanding the factors that make games fun and motivate people to play them voluntarily with so much engagement. Continue reading →

Rise of the Chatbots

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Almost two decades ago I saw in the arcades the futuristic fighting game “Rise of the Robots”. As a youngster I was imagining what the future of computing and robotics could be. The game ended up not being that great, regardless of that it wasn’t visually very realistic, but instead, it relied on the gameplay and partly on the player’s imagination for the immersion. Hence, around this time, I was dreaming of tablets (from Star Trek) and completely autonomous robots that would help us with everyday tasks (like terminators, without the killing part of course and maybe the Jetson’s robots?).

Yet the future was not exactly what I was expecting. After all this experimentation and technological progress, it seems that people hyped with Chatbots (or chatterbots) instead! Continue reading →