Bruna Ferreira

Identifying Possible Requirements using Personas - A Qualitative Study.

Involving end users in requirements elicitation helps to generate applications with a positive usage experience. However, in the current context of software development, having users involved in the requirements elicitation is difficult due to factors such as: lack of paying customers; users’ unavailability for validations; and budget and time restrictions for applying traditional techniques, such as interviews and questionnaires. Therefore, using alternative techniques to understand and gather users’ needs is indicated. Persona is a technique that was created to help understanding users, their characteristics and what they expect from an application. The technique allows describing users’ profile and understanding their characteristics, attitudes and behaviors. However, the description of a persona may have many irrelevant information not generating requirements for the development of the application. Therefore, we proposed the PATHY technique to support the creation of personas and to generate more focused descriptions regarding specific requirements identification for a particular application. This paper presents a study using the PATHY technique (version 2.0). This empirical study aims to evaluate the quality of the possible software requirements the technique helps identifying, while gathering the participants’ feedback on using the PATHY technique. The results show that PATHY supports creating personas’ descriptions that lead to the identification of requirements to help in application design according to target users’ characteristics and

NExPlay - Playability Assessment for Non-experts Evaluators.

Playability is related to the overall quality of the gameplay in a video game. It’s important to evaluate the Playability to support games so they can fulfill the expectations of every player. However, given the high demand of game producers, limited budgets and deadlines, this type of evaluation is not always conducted, affecting the experience of players. One possible solution to evaluate Playability is through heuristic evaluations. Some researchers have conducted studies to develop heuristic sets that can satisfy the existing variety of games. However, given its broad comprehensiveness, those heuristic sets are too extensive and this may affect the feasibility of the assessment. Therefore, this work proposes NExPlay (Non-Expert Playability) Heuristic Set, which has the objective of minimizing the time and cost needed for the Playability assessment. Also, we aim to formulate a set that can be used by non-experts in Playability. The proposed heuristic set is assessed using a controlled experiment aimed at measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of our set, in comparison to another heuristic set. The results indicated that NExPlay identified problems with a more objective description. Furthermore, participants were able to understand the description of the heuristics presented in the NExPlay set more easily.

Using Design Thinking to Design an Application for Recognizing the Work of IT Professionals

The quality of the development process depends not only on the methodologies and on techniques employed, but also on the people who participate in this process. In this context, motivation is an important aspect because it affects the productivity of IT professionals and on the quality of the software developed. A factor that can negatively influence motivation is the lack of recognition for the work done. In the long term, lack of recognition can lead to demotivation and low performance in activities. In order to understand the perception and expectations of IT professionals regarding the recognition of work, a Design Thinking process was carried out. This process focuses on understanding problems based on human expectations and needs in an especific context and generating solutions based on this understanding. This paper reports the experience of using Design Thinking to support the design of a tool for recognition of work in software companies. During the project, we carried out a research with 30 IT professionals from two software companies; we proposed the idea of the tool and conducted tests with possible users. Based on the results of the process, we developed the LIKE tool, aiming to increase the visibility of the contributions of the professionals, facilitate their recognition among colleagues; make explicit knowledge by recording feedback and providing rewards. 1

Evaluation of UX Methods: Lessons Learned When Evaluating a Multi-user Mobile Application

The User Experience UX of a software product is influenced by pragmatic and hedonic aspects, and it is necessary to choose a UX evaluation method that takes both of these aspects into account. In this paper, we report on the lessons learned from applying different UX evaluation methods 3E, 3E*, SAM, MAX, EM, Think Aloud, and Observation in prototyping a multi-user mobile application. We analyzed the different methods in terms of: i the type of problems they identified, ii their contribution to improve the prototype in each development phase, iii encountered difficulties when applying the method, and iv encountered difficulties when analyzing the results of the method. We found that SAM and MAX were the easiest methods to apply and also to analyze their results. They are best used to identify hedonic problems, as is EM, whereas Think Aloud, EM and 3E* best identify pragmatic ones.