M. Cecília C. Baranauskas

Social awareness in HCI

In this forum we celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. ---Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor

De sign —Indicating Through Signs

Introduction Different disciplines have different concepts of “design,” so our understanding of design varies according our particular field. The development of the design concept in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field has inherited approaches, methodologies, and theories coming mainly from Information Systems (IS), Software Engineering (SE), Behavioral and Social Sciences and, more recently, from Design Studies. The rationalist tradition has dominated thinking regarding the design of interactive systems in the Information Systems and Software Engineering fields. As discussed by Ehn and Löwgren,1 the first approaches to IS development can be characterized by a strong belief in systematic design methods founded in mathematical-logical theories. Research interests in accuracy and technical control guided these approaches. The main assumptions behind them, as suggested in some methods of SE, seem to be that the users (end-user, client, customer, stakeholder, or problem owner) are supposed to give complete and explicit descriptions of their demands in terms of the system to be developed. Within the rationalist view of IS development, reality is objectively ascertained, is the same for everyone and is composed of entities, their properties, and relationships. Data is understood as a means of representing the truth about reality, and truth is the correct correspondence between some real entities. An information system is a kind of “plumbing” system through which data flow and, within this perspective, the role of the designer is to specify the truth data structure and functions of the system needed by users.2 According to this view, interface design is just a matter of providing access to the underlying system functionality. In the 1990s, this picture changed and one of the major sources of inspiration was the theoretical discussion on the actual nature of the phenomenon of designing computer artifacts. A reframing of the rationalistic understanding of computer systems started to consider reality as a social construction based on the behavior of its participating agents. Within this view, the role of the designer is to assist users to articulate their problems; discover their information requirements; and evolve a systemic solution. In other words, “design” is understood by Winograd and Flores,3 and Adler and 1 Pelle Ehn and Jonas Löwgren, “Design for Quality-in-Use: Human-Computer Interaction Meets Information Systems Development” in Handbook of HumanComputer Interaction, Martin G. Helander, Thomas K. Landauer, and Prasad V. Prabhu, eds. (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier Science, second completely revised edition 1997), 299–314. 2 Kecheng Liu, Semiotics in Information Systems Engineering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 3 Terry Winograd and Fernando F. Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition—A New Foundation for Design (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing Company, 1986).

Adjustable interactive rings for iDTV

Literature has shown that the remote control, the main artifact for interaction with the television system, is not adequate to mediate the interaction with Interactive Digital Television (iDTV). This work presents and discusses a new proposal of artifact for interaction with iDTV applications. The paper presents in details the product design and the interaction language for the new digital artifact which presupposes its use by everyone, in the widest possible extension. Additionally, we show the prototype of these new hardware devices and an evaluation with prospective end users of the solution described in this paper.

Summarizing observational client-side data to reveal web usage patterns

Client-side event logs may reveal patterns of usage of Web pages. Nevertheless, extracting useful and novel information from this voluminous data set is a challenge for evaluation tools, since a few minutes simple task may result in a sequence of hundreds of events. This work contributes with a technique to process these logs and build a Web pages usage graph summarizing statistical information of the Web page usage concerning one or more sessions. This graph reveals patterns of real usage data, which Human-Computer Interaction specialists may find useful for inspecting accessibility and usability issues. Moreover, Web usage miners can reuse the usage graph to apply other techniques to discover other patterns or rules.

Accessibility and interoperability in e-government systems: outlining an inclusive development process

The multidisciplinary nature of e-government demands a research agenda that includes issues related to social inclusion, universal accessibility, interoperability, privacy, security, and citizen participation, to name a few. Understanding the underlying cultural context, the involvement of citizens in the proposal and evaluation of services, and the promotion of quality in use are aspects that need special consideration in the development of systems to support government. This paper provides an outline for a process model for promoting the identification and specification of accessible e-government services with the participation of the interested parties. A socially shared perspective is adopted toward the comprehension of the involved problems and the elaboration of potential solutions. The proposed model is a result of practice in the domain, using organizational semiotics artifacts to stimulate participation and discussion.

Accessibility as a quality requirement: geographic information systems on the web

Web applications enable users with different profiles and necessities to access information from diversified locations and with different access tools. Besides the aspects that have already been discussed in works from the Software Quality domain, the accessibility to information and the Internet flexibility have been considered more and more important. Thus, considering accessibility as an important quality attribute for Web applications, in this paper we investigate the subject considering the context of Geographic Information Systems on the Web. Preliminary results of accessibility evaluation on some WebGIS applications show that this domain presents several challenges to be coped with in the design of their user interfaces.

Revealing relationships in search engine results

The amount of information available in the Internet is so vast that finding the desired information in such an unstructured repository easily becomes a tedious task. Graphical cluster-based representations of results from search engines shift the users mental load from slower thought-intensive processes of reading information got from linear lists of results to faster perceptual processes such as pattern recognition in a visual display. In this paper we investigate the subject by presenting the design proposal of a new system that uses concepts of Information Visualization to help the user of Internet search engines to identify the group of documents that are related to the needed information by examining or browsing documents in the group. Some results of preliminary usability tests for the system are also provided shedding some light to the subject.

A user‐centred approach to the design of an expert system for training

This paper reports the objectives, design approach and first results of a research project that aims to develop an intelligent computer-based learning environment for industrial applications. Jonas, an expert system, is part of a modelling/simulation environment which enables shopfloor workers to test and to put new philosophies of work into practice in the context of manufacture. Our approach is focused on three main ideas: the Intelligence Augmentation paradigm, user-centred system design and the constructionist theory of learning. The architecture of the modelling environment and the main features of Jonas are presented as an illustration of the design ideas discussed in the paper.

Cartography and geographic information systems as semiotic systems: a comparative analysis

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have grown rapidly, motivated by general trends of information technologies in expanding their potential uses. In line with this tendency, GIS must consider the familiarity of new users with Cartography and their traditional way of representing natural phenomena. This paper evaluates the expressive power of GIS relative to their cartographic elements, based on a Semiotic approach, which is concerned with understanding the construction and interpretation of maps as communication activities. Results obtained by comparing Cartographic and GIS semiotic systems show a great difference in the potential of communication for each of the domains.

Towards a conceptual framework for interaction design for the pragmatic web

In the current World Wide Web, useful information on web sites is often mixed with a lot of information that is not relevant to a user at a particular moment, or is presented in a format that is not optimal for a particular person using a specific artifact. In this paper we argue that to solve problems related to information relevance, presentation and flexibility of use, approaches are required that provide users with uniform ways of accessing and using information and services that are relevant to them at a particular moment in a way that suits their competences and needs. Informed by the Pragmatic Web and hence the questions of how and why people actually access information and services, this work proposes to set a basis for a conceptual framework to better understand, reason about, and design interaction in the Web.