Daniela Fogli

Visual Interactive Systems for End-User Development: A Model-Based Design Methodology

This paper is about the development of systems whose end users are professional people working in a specific domain (e.g., medicine, geology, mechanical engineering); they are expert in that domain, but not necessarily expert in nor even conversant with computer science. In several work organizations, end users need to tailor their software systems to better adapt them to their requirements and even to create or modify software artifacts. These are end-user development activities and are the focus of this paper. A model of the interaction between users and systems, which also takes into account their reciprocal coevolution during system usage, is discussed. This model is used to define a methodology aimed at designing software environments that allow end users to become designers of their own tools. The methodology is illustrated by discussing two experimental cases.

END-USER DEVELOPMENT: THE SOFTWARE SHAPING WORKSHOP APPROACH

In the Information Society, end-users keep increasing very fast in number, as well as in their demand with respect to the activities they would like to perform with computer environments, without being obliged to become computer specialists. There is a great request to provide end-users with powerful and flexible environments, tailorable to the culture, skills, and needs of a very diverse end-user population. In this chapter, we discuss a framework for End-User Development and present our methodology for designing software environments that support the activities of a particular class of end-users, called domain-expert users, with the objective of making their work with the computer easier. Such environments are called Software Shaping Workshops, in analogy to artisan workshops: they provide users only with the necessary tools that allow them to accomplish their specific activities by properly shaping software artifacts without being lost in virtual space.

Knowledge-centered design of decision support systems for emergency management

This paper focuses on the design of decision support systems for emergency managers in charge of planning, coordinating and controlling the actions carried out to respond to a critical situation. A novel knowledge-centered design methodology is proposed and demonstrated through the application in a concrete case study in the field of pandemic flu emergency management. Knowledge-centered design is based on a rational and structured approach to the elicitation and modeling of the knowledge concerning the target environment, the application domain, the intended users, their tasks, and the specific activities that the decision support system is expected to provide. Our proposal aims at overcoming some of the limitations of user-centered and activity-centered design in the specific context of decision support systems. Knowledge-centered design is based on an iterative process that goes through four main phases, namely: target environment identification, domain understanding, user characterization, and functional analysis. The paper illustrates each phase in detail and discusses the application in the proposed case study.

Building environments for end-user development and tailoring

Software shaping workshops (SSWs) described in this paper are software environments designed to support various activities of end-user development (EUD) and tailoring. A design methodology to create easy-to-develop-and-tailor visual interactive systems that are organised as SSWs is illustrated. Users of an interactive system are in many cases experts in some domain different from computer science, who need to perform some task with the aid of the computer system. The design methodology allows users to directly collaborate to the system design and tailoring process to face co-evolution of users and systems. The strategy feasibility is discussed, outlining its implementation through a Web-based prototype.

Toward overcoming culture, skill and situation hurdles in Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract.This paper proposes a new effective strategy for designing and implementing interactive systems overcoming culture, skill and situation hurdles in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The strategy to identify and reduce these hurdles is developed in the framework of a methodology based on a recently introduced model of HCI, and exploits the technological innovations of XML (Extensible Markup Language). HCI is modelled as a cyclic process in which the user and the interactive system communicate by materializing and interpreting a sequence of messages. The interaction process is formalized by specifying both the physical message appearance and the computational aspect of the interaction. This formalization allows the adoption of notation traditionally adopted by users in their workplaces as the starting point of the interactive system design. In this way, the human–system interaction language takes into account the users’ culture. Moreover, the methodology permits user representatives to build a hierarchy of systems progressively adapted to users’ situations, skills and habits, according to the work organization in the domain considered. The strategy is proved to be effective by describing how to implement it using BANCO (Browsing Adaptive Network for Changing user Operativity), a feasibility prototype based on XML, which allows the hierarchy implementation and system adaptations. Several examples from an environmental case under study are used throughout the paper to illustrate the methodology and the effectiveness of the technology adopted.

“Each to His Own”: Distinguishing Activities, Roles and Artifacts in EUD Practices

End-User Development (EUD) studies how to empower end users (among which, e.g., professionals and organizational workers) to modify, adapt and extend the software systems they daily use, thus coping with the evolving needs of their work organizations and the shop-floor environment. This research area is becoming increasingly important also for the cross fertilization of ideas and approaches that come from the fields of Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction. However, if one considers the variety of research proposals stemming from this common ground, there is the risk of losing denotational precision of the key terms adopted in the common vocabulary of EUD. To counteract this natural semantic drift, the objective of this paper is to distinguish within three EUD complementary important notions, namely activities, roles, and artifacts, in order to help researchers deepen important phenomena regarding the “meta-design” of systems built to support EUD practices.

A meta-design approach to the development of e-government services

This paper describes a meta-design approach to the development of online services for citizens of a government agency. The goal is to transfer the development of government-to-citizen services from professional software developers to administrative employees, without forcing employees to acquire any programming skills. The approach encompasses two main phases. The first phase analyzes the different perspectives of the stakeholders involved in service creation and usage - employees, citizens, software developers and human-computer interaction specialists - in order to derive a meta-model of e-government services. The latter applies the meta-model to design and develop an end-user development environment that properly supports employees in creating an instance of the service meta-model, which is then automatically interpreted to generate the service pages for citizens. A pilot application of the proposed approach is illustrated with reference to a specific class of e-government services offered by the Brescia Municipality, even though the approach is general enough to be applied to different kinds of e-government services and application domains. The results of the evaluation with a group of municipality employees provide initial feedback from the government field and show how to proceed along this research direction.

Supporting co-evolution of users and systems by the recognition of interaction patterns

This paper presents an approach to support the designer of Visual Interactive Systems (VISs) in adapting a VIS to the evolution of its users. This process is called co-evolution of users and systems. The approach is based on the identification of the patterns of interaction between the user and an interactive system and on their use for the evolution of the system to facilitate novel usages introduced by the user. The approach is focused on WIMP systems and is based on the recently introduced PCL (Pictorial Computing Laboratory) model of interaction, within which we provide a novel definition of interaction pattern. The proposal assumes that the VIS is observed by an external system called SIC (Supporting Interaction Co-evolution), which is in charge of recording the interactions between the user and the VIS and of analyzing the relevant interaction patterns. In particular, SIC exploits a UML-based statechart specification of the VIS in order to associate observed user activities with the states of the interactive process. This information provides a useful basis for a variety of pattern recognition techniques. Two techniques called usual state and recurrent sequence recognition are illustrated and the results of a first experiment are discussed.

A meta-design approach to end-user development

Meta-design has been recently proposed as a technique for creating the socio-technical conditions empowering users to perform end-user development (EUD) activities. Current techniques and methodologies for designing interactive systems do not stress meta-design. In this paper, we show how the Software Shaping Workshop (SSW) methodology actually follows a meta-design approach in that the teams of designers, including end-user representatives, are supported in their reasoning on software design and development by software environments tailored to their needs, notations and experience.

Affective geographies: toward a richer cartographic semantics for the geospatial web

Due to the increasing sophistication in web technologies, maps can easily be created, modified, and shared. This possibility has popularized the power of maps by enabling people to add and share cartographic content, giving rise to the geospatial web. People are increasingly using web maps to connect with each other and with the urban and natural environment in ways no one had predicted. As a result, web maps are growing into a venue in which knowledge and meanings can be traced and visualized. However, the cartographic semantics of current web mapping services are not designed to elicit and visualize what we call affective meaning. Contributing a new perspective for the geospatial web, the authors argue for affective geographies capable of allowing richer and multiple readings of the same territory. This paper illustrates the cartographic semantics developed by the authors and discusses it through a case study in natural heritage interpretation.