Jean-Claude Tarby

Beyond the Interface: Co-evolution Inside Interactive Systems — A Proposal Founded on Activity Theory

Task oriented and object oriented traditional interactive system design methods show more and more shortcomings in the light of recent evolutions. These evolutions are both external (organisational) and internal (technological) to the developed systems. The two main problems of traditional methods are their linearity and rigidity. Once a system has been introduced, it can only evolve through maintenance. These methods follow several steps segmenting time, actors, and work to be realised. Taking results from the human sciences, and particularly from Activity Theory, we show how we have defined the co-evolution concept as a solution for the above-mentioned problems. We also present the DARE system that we have developed for supporting this concept.

Traces using aspect oriented programming and interactive agent-based architecture for early usability evaluation: basic principles and comparison

Early evaluation of interactive systems is currently the subject of numerous researches. Some of them aim at explicitly coupling design and evaluation by various software mechanisms. We describe in this paper two approaches of early evaluation exploiting new technologies and paradigms. The first approach is based on aspect oriented programming; the second one proposes an explicit coupling between agent-oriented architecture and evaluation agents. These two approaches are globally compared in this paper.

Towards multimodal user interfaces composition based on UsiXML and MBD principles

In software design, the reuse issue brings the increasing of web services, components and others techniques. These techniques allow reusing code associated to technical aspect (as software component). With the development of business components which can integrate technical aspect with HCI, the composition issue has appeared. Our previous work concerned the GUI composition based on an UIDL as UsiXML. With the generalization of Multimodal User Interfaces (MUI), MUI composition principles have to be studied. This paper aims at extend existing basic composition principles in order to treat multimodal interfaces. The same principle as in the previous work, based on the tree algebra, can be used in another level (AUI) of the UsiXML framework to support the Multimodal User Interfaces composing. This paper presents a case study on the food ordering system based on multimodal (coupling GUI and MUI). A conclusion and the future works in the HCI domain are presented.

Multimodal interaction: a survey from model driven engineering and mobile perspectives

The multimodal interaction is becoming richer in last years thanks to the increasing evolution of mobile devices (smartphones/tablets) and their embedded sensors including accelerometer, gyroscope, global positioning system, near field communication and proximity sensors. Using such sensors, either sequentially or simultaneously, to interact with applications ensures an intuitive interaction and the user acceptance. Today, the development of multimodal mobile systems incorporating input and output modalities through sensors is a long and difficult task. Despite the facts that numerous model-based approaches have emerged and are supposed to simplify the multimodal mobile applications engineering, the design and implementation of these applications are still generally in an ad hoc way. In order to explain this situation, the present paper reviews, discusses, and analyses different model-based approaches proposed to develop multimodal mobile applications. The analysis considers not only the modelling and generation of mobile multimodality features, but also the inclusion of model-driven engineering features such as guidance and model reuse that allows the appropriate use of models and benefits from them. Our aim is to identify the current gaps that hinder the facility and acceleration of the multimodal mobile applications development using model-based approaches.

Facilitating the Design of Multi-channel Interfaces for Ambient Computing

Ambient computing is one of the more significant recent advances in computer-human interactions. With the ambient intelligence paradigm, computers become embedded in our natural surroundings. As they are context sensitive and adaptable, they better provide smart services to humans. But ambient computing requires communication between several heterogeneous components that are not supposed to communicate each other. This paper describes how we use a workflow to facilitate the design of multichannel interfaces for ambient computing. Our results show that different devices (such as Wiimote, multi-touch screen, telephone, etc.) can be managed in order to activate real things (such as lamp, fan, robot, webcam, etc.). A smart digital home case study illustrates a possible implementation of our approach and shows how it allows redesigning easily some parts of the ambient system just by modifying the workflow.

Trace-Based Usability Evaluation Using Aspect-Oriented Programming and Agent-Based Software Architecture

To evaluate how people use interactive applications, many techniques and methods are proposed. In this chapter, we describe two innovative evaluation approaches that exploit the concept of traces as a way of capturing the usage of the system. The first approach uses Aspect-Oriented Programming; the second proposes an explicit coupling between agent-based architecture and evaluation agents. These two approaches are compared.

Defining task oriented components

For many years, tailorability has been identified as a very important property of system design in order to take care of the emerging users needs towards their working environments. In the same time component-based approaches have been revealed as an interesting solution for tailorability, allowing dynamic integration of components in global environments supporting specific tasks. However, component technologies still face some drawbacks mainly due to a semantic problem. In order to palliate these lacks we propose in this paper a new solution that tends to merge tasks models, from the HCI research field, and existing component models. It particularly consists in a new design approach -- the Task Oriented (TO) approach -- supported by STOrM, a tool dedicated to the creation and manipulation of Task Oriented Components (TOCs).

MIMIC: leveraging sensor-based interactions in multimodal mobile applications

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the presence of sensors in mobile devices. Emergence of multiple modalities based on these sensors greatly enriches the human-mobile interaction. However, mobile applications slightly involve sensors and rarely combine them simultaneously. In this paper, we seek to remedy this problem by detailing the key challenges that face developers who want to integrate several sensor-based modalities and combine them. We then present our model-based approach solution. We introduce M4L modeling language and MIMIC framework that aim to produce easily sensor-based multimodal mobile applications by generating up to 100% of their interfaces.

A Model-based Approach for Engineering Multimodal Mobile Interactions

Mobile phones have benefited from many enhancements since several years, including an increasing number of their embedded sensors (accelerometer, light sensor...). Created for giving context-aware abilities, these sensors also allow new types of interaction and pave the way to a great expansion of multimodal mobile interactions. Unfortunately, the current context of mobile software development makes difficult the development of multimodal applications. We propose our model-based solution that aims to facilitate the development of multimodal mobile interfaces. We adopt the principles of the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) which is particularly fitted for such context. Our proposition includes M4L modeling language, library of high-level sensor-based modalities and MIMIC framework. Our approach respects the main criteria of the MDE in order to define an efficient model-based approach. Results of the first evaluation suggest that using our approach facilitates the development of sensor-based multimodal mobile interfaces.

A support to multi-devices web application

Programming an application which uses interactive devices located on different terminals is not easy. Programming such applications with standard Web technologies (HTTP, Javascript, Web browser) is even more difficult. However, Web applications have interesting properties like running on very different terminals, the lack of a specific installation step, the ability to evolve the application code at runtime. Our demonstration presents a support for designing multi-devices Web applications. After introducing the context of this work, we briefly describe some problems related to the design of multi-devices web application. Then, we present the toolkit we have implemented to help the development of applications based upon distant interactive devices.