Andrea Pandurino

Rich-IDM: extending IDM to model rich internet applications

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) technologies offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction and navigation in ways that allow web engineers to share through a common vocabulary, as well as sketch, to explore and specify design decisions at the light of usability requirements and stakeholders goals. To meet this challenge, we codify a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of RIA. We demonstrate through a case study the promising advantages of our approach: expressiveness to capture interactive features at a high level of abstraction, semi-formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engineers, and traceability of the design to important usability requirements.

Dialogue‐based modeling of rich internet applications: the Rich‐IDM approach

Purpose – Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction and navigation in ways that allow web engineers to share through a common vocabulary, as well as sketch, explore and specify design decisions in the light of usability requirements and stakeholders goals. The purpose of this paper is to address this problem.Design/methodology/approach – To meet this challenge, the authors extend IDM (Interactive Dialogue Model), a dialogue‐based approach focusing on the conceptual dialogue flow with the user, codifying a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of RIAs.Findings – The approach, called Rich‐IDM demonstrated some relevant features: expressiveness to capture interactive features at a high level of abstractio...

Rich-IDM: Transforming the user experience of legacy applications

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) can be used as a way to modernize Legacy Applications (LAs), in particular to provide users with an innovative, state-of-the-art interactive experience. RIAs have the same richness in term of interaction grammar as Client-Server Applications (CSAs) and Desktop Applications (DAs), giving designers the opportunity to exploit the Web infrastructure also in domains where the communication between the user and the application is more complex of a sequence of page requests. In the transition from LAs to RIAs, however, several challenges need to be faced, including fundamental issues affecting user requirements and usability. In this paper we present the preliminary results of a large-scale industrial project, which focused on migrating a complex LA (VB6 + Cobol) to a RIA (JSF + SOA). In this context, we introduce a novel method (Rich-IDM) to transform the design of the User Experience (UX) and the strategy for interactive communication from LAs to RIAs in a graceful and disciplined manner, thus preventing the many flaws that typically are manifested in similar projects. We also show how Rich-IDM originally extends and well integrates into other well-known conceptual tools — the Conallens UX model and the RUX model — within the OMGs ADM framework.

Designing Complex Web Information Systems: Integrating Evolutionary Process Engineering

Corporations across the globe are increasingly considering the importance of user experience and business process design in creation of Web information systems. Designing Complex Web Information Systems: Integrating Evolutionary Process Engineering provides an overview of modern Web application technologies useful to business designers. Containing advanced findings from across the globe, this Premier Reference Source presents cutting-edge research on user experience design methodologies and the design of business processes.

WAPS: Web Application Prototyping System

The growing demand for web applications and the new multi-user and multi-device requirements of these has led to the need for a structured and well-reasoned approach that helps both the application designer and the developer to produce a good quality product. On one hand we have the application designer, who has to describe all aspects of the application and manage the complexity of the tasks; on the other hand both the application customer and the developer need to validate and understand the designers choices. To conciliate these needs, we propose a prototyping framework based on W2000 methodology: in this way the designer has a powerful tool to keep control over the web application, the customer has a point of reference for evaluating the design, and the developer can better understand the design thanks to the prototyped application.

A dialogue-based framework for the user experience reengineering of a legacy application

Kraft [1] defines the User Experience - UX - as the set of sensations that the end user feels using a product. These sensations dominate so much the UX curve, to generate spikes or dips depending on how positive or negative such feelings are. The UX, therefore, represents a likelihood index of the user willing to continue to use a product. Ansuini [2] defines a legacy application - LA - as an information system of value inherited from the past. Nowadays, most of the companies make use of LAs, which on one side are characterized by high reliability and specialization, but on the other have an equally high degree of obsolescence, also with regard to the user interface. This paper introduces a framework for the UX reengineering of a LA, using the methodology Interactive Dialogue Model - IDM. The framework enables the definition and the implementation of the UX reengineering operations through a specific process, characterized by a series of steps. The reengineering process can take place in an almost fully automatic way, even if, in some phases, is still guaranteed the possibility to the designer to intervene on the intermediate diagrams. Given the reiteration of the reengineering process, it is necessary to historicize the changes made by the designer, and automatically applies them, when necessary, without any manual intervention. At this purpose, the implemented editor generates some extra runtime ATL - ATLAS Transformation Language - rules, in order to keep track of the customizations made on the model by the designer.

MIGROS: a model-driven transformation approach of the user experience of legacy applications

Model-driven engineering is a promising approach for the modernization of legacy applications, but there are still many issues to address, especially to obtain automatic refactoring of the User Experience (UX) of existing applications applying modern interaction paradigms as Rich Internet Application (RIA). The MIGROS tool tries to solve the hurdles for the model-driven modernization of the UX of legacy application (as implemented in Cobol CICS, Visual Basic, Power Builder, etc.). It is designed upon a set of well-known methods in the web engineering field. It is implemented as a set of Eclipse plug-ins that support reverse engineering and model transformation exploiting the OMG Architecture-Driven Modernization (ADM) technology.

Streamlining complexity: conceptual page re-modeling for rich internet applications

The growth of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) calls for new conceptual tools that enable web engineers to model the design complexity unleashed by innovative interaction (with increasing communication potential) and to carefully consider the impact of the design decisions on the optimal flow of the User Experience (UX). In this paper we illustrate how is particularly relevant for RIA engineering not only to capture existing RIA technologies with suitable design artifacts but also to model an effective dialogue between users and RIA interfaces. Through a case study, we propose a set of conceptual design primitives (Rich-IDM) to enable web engineers to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction, and to take design decisions which meet both usability and communication requirements.

EB2000: a structured approach to the creation of e-books

Taking into account that the new capabilities of modern e-book readers can manage a lot of media suck as audio, video and allow an excellent interaction with the user than could add a comments or bookmarks, activate applet such as test or example in a educational e-book, the e-book could be considered as a real hypermedia document with strong interaction with its reader. Until now, unfortunately, the e-book has been seen as a transposition of the paper model onto a digital one, aiming to reduce the time and costs of distribution; thus the author has no incentive to rethink the content for the potential offered by the electronic medium. The task is no longer to provide a form of mediation between digital support and traditional book, but to reinterpret the modalities of spread of knowledge. Here we present an attempt, using W2000 methodology to arrive at a structured approach to design that place the authors at the center of the process. Using this analysis we present EB2000, a new Web-based authoring tool in which the authors can create specific e-book content, cooperate with other author or third parties for multimedia content, and to publishing the complete e-book in standard format.

E-learning Project Assessment Using Learners’ Topic in Social Media

A correct assessment of e-learning projects is a complex task because there are several aspects (such as contents, technologies, organizations etc.) that must be considered and many actors (learners, teachers, pedagogues, etc.) each one with specific requirements to be met. In recent years, in order to standardize the evaluation and to define the quality features of an e-learning project, several sets of factors (called Critical Success Factors) have been defined. The Critical Success Factors are focused on many aspects but, in our vision, they don’t consider properly the learners’ opinions. The learner is exactly the main e-learning project stakeholder. Thus, he/she could be considered at the centre of the e-learning system and his/her opinions must be carefully evaluated. In this paper, we describe our idea to support the analysis of the learners’ discussions posted on the web2.0 media (like forums, wikis, etc.) and to support the subsequent evaluation of the lacks and the benefits of e-learning projects.