Luciana A. M. Zaina

Classification of learning profile based on categories of student preferences

In an environment applied in engineering teaching, as in many knowledge areas, is very important to know and understand learner differences in a way to be able to adapt systempsilas actions to studentpsilas best learning conditions and aptitudes. Working thus makes it possible to identify learning profiles within a group of students, allowing the system to supply learners with contents and tools more suited for them. The goal of this work is to present the architecture of a system that realizes an evaluation of learning profiles based on categories of student preferences. The categories are defined from Felder-Silverman Learning Style Model. The architecture enables the teacher to specify the observable characteristics he considers most suitable within the teaching scope in question, whose characteristics are related with categories of student preferences. Through the categories create a relationship between what is observed and the learning objects used to build automatically the learning scenarios according to the student learning profile.

Model driven RichUbi: a model driven process for building rich interfaces of context-sensitive ubiquitous applications

The demand for software in Ubiquitous Computing, in which access to applications occurs anywhere, anytime and from different devices, has raised new challenges for Software Engineering. One of these challenges is related to the adaptation of the contents of an application to the numerous devices that can access it in distinct contexts. Another challenge is related to the building of rich interfaces with multimedia content, asynchronous communication and other features that characterize Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Searching for solutions focused on these challenges, a model-driven process for building rich interfaces of context-sensitive ubiquitous applications has been developed. The process, which is based on the conceptions of Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM), emphasizes the modeling reuse from a rich interface components metamodel. This metamodel provides a generic infrastructure for developing rich interfaces of applications, focusing on model-level reuse and on code generation for different Ubiquitous Computing platforms. In addition, the metamodel allows that the interface models are built by using the terms of rich interface domain, which facilitates the communication between users and developers.

Top-Down Approach for Web Services Development

This paper focuses on Web Services development presenting an approach that investigates the model-based software development towards Service-Oriented Architecture. This work explores software development based on Domain-Specific Modeling for building WSDL 2.0 meta-model. The Multiple Views CASE tool supports the development process of Web Services according to top-down approach through the creation of models at a high level of abstraction and the partial code generation. A case study in the Electronic Health domain illustrates the proposed in this work. The main contribution of the work is leverage agility and ease Web Services development process through highlevel specification based on the meta-model.

UserX Story: Incorporating UX Aspects into User Stories Elaboration

In the last decade, many strategies have been employed successfully to incorporate User Experience UX practices into agile development in order to increase user satisfaction with the product. In this paper, we present a grammar for stories of interaction called UserX Story, in order to remedy the difficulties encountered by teams to insert UX aspects and usability requirements in the first steps of software conception. An action research approach was applied to carry out the research within the industry, allowing us to work closely with the agile teams. The research cycle was split in three steps. In the first step, we carried out a technical literature survey, aiming to investigate the use of user stories in the agile methodologies, and additionally, an ethnographic study also was carried out in order to understand how the traditional user stories were being developed by product owners. In the second step, we proposed together with both teams - UX and agile - a grammar to UserX Story incorporating two concepts of UX: personas and Nielsens heuristics. In the third step, six product owners were invited to implement the UserX Stories in real projects. After that, we interviewed the participants aiming to collect their experiences with the implementation of UserX Stories. Thus, we have found out that most of the agile teams approved the use of the stories incorporating UX aspects.

Learning Profile Identification Based on the Analysis of the User's Context of Interaction

One of the e-learning environment goal is to attend the individual needs of students during the learning process. The adaptation of contents, activities and tools into different visualization or in a variety of content types is an important feature of this environment, bringing to the user the sensation that there are suitable workplaces to his profile in the same system. Nevertheless, it is important the investigation of student behaviour aspects, considering the context where the interaction happens, to achieve a efficient personalization process. The paper goal is to present an approach to identify the student learning profile analyzing the context of interaction. Besides this, the learning profile could be analized in different dimensions allows the system to deal with the different focus of the learning.

A Perspective-based Usability Inspection for ERP Systems

The inspection methods to evaluate the usability of ERP systems require more specific heuristics and most suitable criteria into this field. This article proposes a set of heuristics based on perspectives of presentation, and task support aiming to facilitate the inspection of usability in ERP systems especially for novice inspectors. An empirical study was conducted to verify the efficiency and effectiveness of inspections conducted with the proposed heuristics. The results indicate the efficiency and effectiveness to detect problems, mainly in medium-fidelity prototypes of ERP modules.

An approach to design the student interaction based on the recommendation of e-learning objects

In the last years, the adoption of recommender systems for improving user interaction has increased in e-learning applications. In the educational area, the recommendation of relevant and interesting content can attract the students attention, motivating her/him during the learning-teaching process. It is very important, thus, to know learner preferences to suggest suitable contents to the students. The goal of this work is to present an approach to design the student interaction based on the recommendation of e-learning content, determining a more suitable relationship between learning objects and learning profiles. In our proposal, the learning profile is split into categories to attend different student preferences during the teaching-learning process: perception, presentation-format and participation. Our recommendation uses these categories to filter out the most suitable learning objects organized according to the IEEE LOM standard. We present a prototype architecture named e-LORS, over which we perform demonstrative experiments.

Improving User Interfaces for a Request Tracking System: Best Practical RT

User Interface (UI) design guidelines have not been adequately applied towards the design of UI of request tracking systems. Moreover, UI of request tracking systems in particular have not been researched in federated e-Science organisations. These systems, however, play a central role for the collaboration in e-Science. The users of e-Science infrastructures that constitute data and High Performance Computer (HPC) facilities interact with the cyber-infrastructures to use their features mainly for research purposes. The incoming problems and information queries i.e. user requests are shown using a Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the Request Tracking System (RTS) – like other software systems. In this paper, a field study has been conducted and it has been found out that in the process of using a cyber-infrastructure the users face problems on one hand as well as the people who process incoming user requests also need better UI of RTS on the other hand. From this field study observations were made and amendments in the current UI of RTS were proposed. Moreover, the UI of RTS has been evaluated and recommendations have been made to improve it in a federated e-Science environment using a field study.

Communication of Design Decisions and Usability Issues: A Protocol Based on Personas and Nielsen’s Heuristics

Although both agile developers and UX designers have a common concern regarding to build software with quality, they usually have different viewpoint of the user experience and usability. We have proposed a protocol in which personas and Nielsen’s heuristics were used as a common vocabulary between designers and developers (SCRUM team) for the communication of recommendations and/or design solutions. We have adopted action research to conduct our research, performing a workshop and interviews to study the feasibility of the proposal; and later two case studies to compare and evaluate the use and non-use the protocol. In the final, adding to the case study comparison, we interviewed the SCRUM team who revealed that the protocol improved the understanding of recommendations and the Nielsen’s heuristics contributed to objectively communicate the main problems of interaction.

Towards an Approach Matching CMD and DSR to Improve the Academia-Industry Software Development Partnership: A Case of Agile and UX Integration

The interest on promoting the Academia-Industry partnership in the software development field has been increasingly encouraged by means of research approaches that support the cooperation between researchers and practitioners. The main focus is driven by the collaborative work where the scientific research work meets the real needs of the Industry. Aiming to contribute to this effort we present an approach called Soft Coder (Software Cooperative Design Research) that combines CMD (Cooperative Method Development), a method of Action Re-search, to concepts of DSR (Design Science Research). Our proposal supports the conduction of projects integrating the view-points of Industry and Academia, aiming to add User experience (UX) methods into agile practices. We carried out two studies applying the Soft Coder approach in a software Industry, work in close cooperation with UX and SCRUM teams for building and evaluating artifacts based on UX methods to support practical activities of both teams.