José L. Arciniegas

Designing and Evaluating Interactive Television from a Usability Perspective

Interactive television (iTV) is the convergence of television with digital media technologies. iTV must be treated as a unique medium with its own set of constraints and opportunities. A set of principles to follow, when designing iTV applications, is presented. Heuristics to be applied when evaluating iTV applicationspsila usability is described.

Asset recovery and their incorporation into product lines

Software product lines aim in having a common platform from which several similar products can be derived. The elements of the platform are called assets and they are managed in an asset base being part of the product line infrastructure. Assets can include own developments, open source or third-party software modules, as well as design and project documents. In the context of the European-wide project FAMILIES, we concentrated on techniques used to populate the asset base by recovering assets from existing systems. We present an approach on how to incorporate existing assets into the product line infrastructure. Thereby we explicitly distinguish the asset origins and the different information sources available. The incorporation is a quality-driven process that is backed up by a set of reverse engineering techniques to evaluate the assets internal quality. The quality assessment of an asset is the critical measurement for industrial development organizations in order to incorporate assets into their product line infrastructure.

Evaluating interactive digital television applications through usability heuristics

Interactive Digital Television (iDT) is considered as the convergence of television and computer technologies. Usability evaluation for applications based on emerging information technology brings new challenges. The main iDT feature is that the user may interact with the application; therefore usability should be a main concern when designing iDT applications. Current research usually focuses on iDT applications from a technical point of view, rather than a user–centered approach. There is a need for new usability evaluation methods or at least for the use of traditional evaluations in novel ways. A set of specific usability heuristics was defined and validated, in order to help the usability evaluations of iDT applications. A usability checklist to be used when applying iDT heuristics is also proposed.

Architectural Modelling in Product Family Context

The software development community pursues the development of software systems with a higher degree of reuse, reduction of costs, and shorter time to market. One of the successful mechanisms followed to achieve these goals is based on sharing the development efforts, producing sets of similar products. This approach is known as Product Family Engineering (PFE). Architectural modeling (producing architectural models) in product families is a key issue in PFE activities and it will be the main focus of this paper. First, we will propose an architectural UML meta-model for PFE, able to represent the different variations in products. This meta-model will set up the conceptual basis for two valuable sets of activities that reflect industrial best practices: one deals with effectively building and maintaining the product family architecture and the other with the automatic derivation of architectures of specific products. A small example of automatic derivation is included.

A Framework for Resolution of Deployment Dependencies in Java-Enabled Service Gateways

Software deployment refers to the set of activities regarding the movement of the software from the development environment to the final delivery environment. These activities cover the release, installation, activation, adaptation, deactivation, update, removal and retirement of software components in a set of hosts. The deployment of services in distributed systems is still an open problem, despite the fact of the several research efforts and standards that have covered this activity in the lifecycle of systems. The substitution of programs by assemblies of components, which is typical of service oriented architectures, has made this situation even worse. In this article, we describe a framework for the resolution of dependencies between services implementations and its application to the Java-based service model for services gateways (OSGi). This framework performs the recursive identification and resolution of dependencies between services in OSGi platforms, including the resolution of native dependencies. The framework requirements and its architecture are presented. It is being applied to an industrial case study about the distributed deployment of services on heterogeneous platforms.

ECUSI: a software tool that supports the Usability Collaborative Evaluation of Interactive Systems

Usability is a fundamental characteristic for the success of an interactive system. It is a concept that includes a set of metrics and methods for users to obtain easy-to-use and easy-to-learn systems. On the one hand, Usability Evaluation Methods - UEM are quite diverse, and for that reason the selection of a method, or combination of methods, to evaluate the usability of an interactive system is not a simple task. On the other hand, the literature provides descriptions about the usability evaluation process. In that sense, this paper presents the software tool called ECUSI - Usability Collaborative Evaluation of Interactive Systems, which aims to support the implementation of activities that make a set of UEM. ECUSI is intended to be helpful for usability evaluators of interactive software systems.

User Interface Development Framework of Interactive Systems based on Video Content Distribution

This article presents the doctoral proposal User Interface Development Framework of Interactive Systems based on Video Content Distribution, whose fundamental purposes are guiding developers and speeding the development process of these types of applications in the learning context. The creation of this framework expects to eliminate the existing gap in terms of the lack of a development framework of this nature and promote HCI aspects on the interface of this type of applications. Then, the article presents the most important sections of the proposal.

Participatory design method: Co-Creating user interfaces for an educational interactive system

In this paper we present a participatory design method for the conceptual design of the user interface, which uses different techniques for capturing the mental models of experts and users. Each technique is carefully specified, and it is implemented in the user interface design for an interactive system in the educational context. The implementation of these techniques allowed the definition of the domain model, first interface sketches, specification of technological components, scenarios, among others. Likewise, their implementation evidenced the need of introducing a brand-new technique that complements the method.

A Roadmap for User Interface Design of Interactive Systems: An Approach Based on a Triad of Patterns

This article presents a Roadmap for user interface designing based on a triad of patterns (data, interaction, and presentation) that comprehends the principles and guidelines from MBUID, HCI, and DCU with the purpose of promoting usability on the final interface. The roadmap is supported by a method, a tool, and languages that allow interface designing. This study is focused on the method only, and it presents the activities and artifacts in detail through its application in a case study in the educational context.

Method for the Integration of the Didactic Strategy Model in Virtual Learning Platforms in the University Context: A Mechanism that Takes into Account the Professor’s Work

The Learning Management Systems (LMS) have brought great benefits and changes in the way teachers and students interact in the teaching-learning process. However, it is evidenced that the LMSs are not capturing the professor’s intentions to perform his work as a teacher, but they focus on providing technology; although useful, it makes the professor’s work remain in the background. Likewise, the fact that the LMSs do not supply intuitive mechanisms for the customization of the teaching-learning process considering learning styles was also identified. Having in mind these detected problems, this article pretends to contribute with a possible solution through a method that allows the inclusion of a visual model of activity sequences defined as the didactic strategy model in LMS, so that the resources offered by the LMS are exploited, and the professor can focus on his work and the students’ needs. The method is implemented through a concept test in the Moodle platform.