Utrecht University

schoolSchoolbar_chart#103 Global Rank

Total Papers

HCI Rank

#103

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Years Active

Recent Publications

Don’t Hit The Wall, Just Squeeze The Ball: How Tangible Interactive Devices Can Help Manage Frustration In Online Games

Frustration in games can have negative consequences for both players and those around them. Despite these effects, methods for supporting frustration management in hectic gameplay are scarce. In this paper, we present Frustration Buddy, a novel tangible intervention system aimed at managing frustration during play. Fr…

CHI '26Game UX & Player Behavior +3

Queering Character Creation: Player Perspectives on Choosing Characters' Gender and Sexual Orientation in Role-Playing Games

Role-playing games allow players to explore a digital world through a character's eyes. For minority groups, such as queer players, representation is not a given when playing popular role-playing games. We surveyed a diverse sample of 464 queer and non-queer players and followed up with 31 in-depth interviews. We aske…

CHI '26Human-LLM Collaboration +2

Reflective AI: A Slow Technology Approach for Design Education

The proliferation of efficiency-focused AI tools in creative processes threatens to undermine critical, reflective practices foundational to design education. This approach can lead to creativity exhaustion and diminished agency among designers and students. As an antidote, we propose Reflective AI: an approach ground…

CHI '26Honorable MentionAI-Assisted Decision-Making & Automation +2

Do People Appropriately Rely on AI-Advice? An Analytical Review of HCI Research on Human-AI Decision-Making

AI systems are increasingly being positioned to assist people in decision-making. However, recent empirical studies show critical concerns that people over-rely on AI advice without analytically engaging with it. While HCI research explores how people rely on AI advice, we argue that it largely overlooks an important…

CHI '26Honorable MentionDark Patterns Recognition +2

Dark Patterns and the EU Digital Services Act: Mapping Autonomy Violations and Design Factors

Dark patterns are design practices that undermine users' ability to make autonomous and informed choices in digital experiences. The EU Digital Services Act (DSA) seeks to protect users from such designs and their effects, with Article 25 prohibiting three autonomy violation types: deception, manipulation and distorti…

CUI '25Agent Personality & Anthropomorphism +2

Transparent Conversational Agents: The Impact of Capability Communication on User Behavior and Mental Model Alignment

When a user interacts with a conversational agent for the first time, they may not be aware of the agent's capabilities, leading to suboptimal use or interaction breakdowns. To avoid a mismatch with the actual capabilities, the agent's capabilities have to be made transparent to the user. To investigate whether commu…

CHI '25Recommender System UX +2

Seeing Eye to AI? Applying Deep-Feature-Based Similarity Metrics to Information Visualization

Judging the similarity of visualizations is crucial to various applications, such as visualization-based search and visualization recommendation systems. Recent studies show deep-feature-based similarity metrics correlate well with perceptual judgments of image similarity and serve as effective loss functions for task…

CHI '25Fitness Tracking & Physical Activity Monitoring +1

Unhealthy Comparisons to Promote Healthy Behavior? Exploring the Impact of Social Comparison Strategies in Personal Informatics.

Previous work on Social Comparison Theory shows that comparing oneself to others can lead to negative self-perceptions and rumination, reducing self-confidence. Despite these harmful effects, social comparisons are frequently used as engagement strategies in personal informatics systems, such as health and wellness ap…

CHI '25Game UX & Player Behavior +1

Progression Balancing × Baldur’s Gate 3: Insights, Terms and Tools for Multi-Dimensional Video Game Balance

Internal game balancing is one of the major components that affect player experience, as it is responsible for a large share of development time, the majority of game update patches and long-term player satisfaction. This makes tools and methodologies of assessing and advancing game balance a valuable endeavor for ind…

CHI '25Generative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video) +2

Characterizing Photorealism and Artifacts in Diffusion Model-Generated Images

Diffusion model-generated images can appear indistinguishable from authentic photographs, but these images often contain artifacts and implausibilities that reveal their AI-generated provenance. Given the challenge to public trust in media posed by photorealistic AI-generated images, we conducted a large-scale experim…

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https://hci.top/en/institutions/Utrecht%20University?source=all

At a Glance

Institution Snapshot

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Utrecht University

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Location

Netherlands · Europe

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Overall Rank

#103

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Total Papers

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Active Years

2018-2026

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39 researchers · 1 collaborators

Research Profile

Top Research Directions

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Games, Entertainment & Gamification

Game UX & Player Behavior

AI & Machine Learning Interaction

Explainable AI (XAI)

Virtual, Augmented & Mixed Reality (XR)

Immersion & Presence Research

Research Methods & Design Practice

Prototyping & User Testing

Privacy, Security & Trust

Privacy by Design & User Control