“In my research, I evaluate what people do when and why while interacting with a product or system. The goal: to make people happier when using that product or system!”

Regina Bernhaupt is Full Professor of Measuring and Analyzing Quality of Dynamic Real Life Systems. Making people's lives better by understanding how, when and why interactive systems fail is the driving force behind Bernhaupt’s research. Her focus is on how to evaluate technologies during all design and development phases – from idea generation to product deployment. In her work, she studies how to evaluate usability and user experience in various contexts, especially for entertainment oriented products and services.

Bernhaupt’s background is in artificial intelligence, computer science and psychology. She is an active member of the human-computer interaction community and has organized conferences and workshops. She has also worked in various EU-funded and national projects and with the interdisciplinary team at the ICT&S Center, giving her a deep experience with interdisciplinary work, within institutions as well as projects.

Her book on Games User Experience Evaluation (published with Springer) has become a classic for UX evaluation methods education. Her work on interaction concepts in industry has been awarded several red dot awards (over 12) including the Best of the Best for TICTACTILE in 2017.

Regina Bernhaupt studied Psychology and Applied Informatics at the University of Salzburg, Austria, and received her PhD there in Summer 2002, on artificial time-coded neural networks. In 2009, she completed her habilitation qualifications at Université Paul Sabatier in Toulose, France. In 2007, she started as Invited Professor at the IRIT in Toulose and as User Experience Research Director at award-winning design firm Ruwido Austria. In 2017, she accepted a Full Professorship at Eindhoven University of Technology. She also still works as research director for Ruwido. Bernhaupt is currently acting as VP for Membership and Communication in the Executive Committee of SIGCHI and is founder for the ACM SIGCHI CHI PLAY Conference.

• IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse)
• Salzburg University

Partners in (semi-)industry

• Ruwido Austria

Squad: Games and Play

Research focus, project topics I’d like to coach
“The project I am interested in coaching are the themes of our squad Games and Play:
-  Tangible Data Visualization: Our world is becoming increasingly driven by data, making it important to help people understand and engage with the data. As such solutions that allow to efficiently communicate and perceive data are important in today’s society. Recent advances in tangibles and sensor technology have created an opportunity to bring data visualizations into the physical world.
How can we create physical representations of data that are playful and foster personal development, learning, or simple enjoyment?
- Behavioral Change: Games or gamified solutions have the ability to drive behavioral change in everyday life, on an individual as well as on a group and societal level. Solutions need, however, be designed in a way that they a) evoke users interest to convince people to adapt and use them and b) are able to measure the impact they have on their users. This leads to an interesting two-way interaction to be explored: using data to drive change and measuring change through data.

What is your vision on education/coaching?
“Key for systemic change is the ability to design not only on the level of an individual interacting with a product but to design for society. This requires from the student to be able to take different lenses in their design. My main forte in education is the level of detailed support that I can provide if necessary, especially when it comes to scaling design solutions to fit larger user groups and society. My coaching style is strongly influenced by my industrial background, where people work in teams to solve problems, and where there is a rather clear structure and timeline for the projects.”

Exemplary graduation projects of students I coached
Bas Plijnaer: Ethermal: Enhancing VR Presence Through Thermal Feedback