Home
News
- I will be presenting a hands-on course on Measuring the User Experience at the UCIT Summer School on Product User Experience, in Tampere, Finland, August 2010.
- I will be joining the Dagstuhl seminar on Demarcating User Experience, 15-18 September 2010.
- Invited talks at TU Delft Design Aesthetics Section (28 June 2010), SIGCHI Finland – Helsinki (1 Sept 2010) and Nokia Research Center – Tampere (2 Sept 2010).
- I will be visiting the Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, 1-13 May 2010.
- I visited the Virtual Knowledge Studio on March 17, where I presented my research proposal on CognitiveNet.
- I was awarded my PhD (cum laude) on 23 March 2010. A press release in English and Dutch, and the full text.
- I strongly recommend Daniel Kahneman’s TED talk on The riddle of experience vs. memory. See also our work on iScale, the long paper, and a brief summary.
- You are warmly invited to the mini-symposium on Diversity in User Experience, preceding my PhD defense on the 23rd of March at 1pm, at zaal 1, Zwarte Doos, Eindhoven University of Technology. Seating is limited, priority will be given to the ones who have registered. More information and registration at: http://ekarapanos.com/symposium/
I am a Human-Computer Interaction researcher with an interest in developing and testing computational tools for supporting the analytical reasoning process in qualitative research. I am affiliated with the User-Centered Engineering Group in the department of Industrial Design of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).
In my PhD thesis I developed a number of tool-based methods for understanding and modeling the diversity in users’ experiences with interactive products, with the aim of informing design. These included work on mathematical modeling (with Multi-Dimensional Scaling) of personal attribute judgments (see Repertory Grid Technique), methodological approaches to longitudinal research (e.g. the Day Reconstruction Method and iScale, a tool that employs sketching in supporting users in reconstructing their experiences with a product) and computational approaches that support the analysis of experience narratives. I was supervised by Jean-Bernard Martens.
From May to August 2008 I visited the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I worked with John Zimmerman and Jodi Forlizzi on my ongoing project on temporality of experience.
I hold a BSc in Physics/microelectronics from University of Patras, Greece and an MSc in Human-Computer Interaction from UCL, UK. My BSc dissertation focused on the model-based design and evaluation of walk-up-and-use interfaces which was conducted at the HCI Group of the University of Patras. My MSc thesis focused on the user acceptance of nomadic user interfaces for domestic environments. It was part of my internship at Philips Research.
Projects
Retrospective elicitation techniques as an alternative to longitudinal methods
 |
Longitudinal methods are considered as the gold standard in understanding the use and acceptance of interactive products beyond initial interactions. Nevertheless, such studies are scarce in HCI literature, mostly due to their laborious nature. In this line of research, we are trying to examine the viability of retrospective techniques for eliciting longitudinal user experience data. See also iScale.
|
User Experience Over Time
 |
The way we experience and evaluate interactive products develops over time. In this line of research we are trying to understand the patterns of such changes, their antecedents (e.g. dynamics of the importance of qualities) and the implications for design.
|
|
Karapanos E., Zimmerman J., Forlizzi J., Martens J.-B. User Experience Over Time: An Initial Framework, In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI ‘09. ACM, New York, NY, 729-738. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518814 |
|
|
Karapanos, E., Hassenzahl, M., Martens, J.-B. (2008) User experience over time. CHI’08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. Florence, ACM Press. |
|
Quantifying Diversity in User Experience
 |
Understanding the diversity in users has been one of the core challenges in user centered design. Yet, averaging across subjects is the common practice in user experience evaluation, partly due to the lack of appropriate techniques. This project aims at proposing techniques that can help designers and researchers to explore users’ diverse experiences with interactive products.
|
|
Karapanos E., Martens J.-B., Hassenzahl M. Accounting for Diversity in Subjective Judgments, In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 – 09, 2009). CHI ‘09. ACM, New York, NY, 639-648. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518801 |
|
|
Karapanos, E. & Martens, J.-B. (2008) The quantitative side of the Repertory Grid Technique: some concerns. in the proceedings of the workshop Now Let’s Do It in Practice: User Experience Evaluation Methods in Product Development, Human factors in computing systems CHI ‘08. Florence. |
|
Precision in Persona Development
 |
Personas are a wonderful user-centered design tool. But, how reliable are they? Do personas reflect actual user populations? In this project we have been trying to create user profiling techniques that can serve as a starting point in persona development. By understanding how individuals respond to early concepts we believe that may result in more precise personas that are differentiated on users’ attitudes towards our product.
|
On the Retrospective Assessment of Users’ Experiences Over Time: Memory or Actuality?