Milene Selbach Silveira

User-Centered Design and Agile Methods: A Systematic Review

This paper presents the results of a systematic review of existing literature on the integration of agile software development with user-centered design approaches. It shows that a common process model underlies such approaches and discusses which artifacts are used to support the collaboration between designers and developers.

Ten Lessons Learned from Integrating Interaction Design and Agile Development

Agile development have a distinct culture that at first glance seems to conflict with Interaction Design. Therefore, integrating these two areas becomes a challenging task. There is little guidance about integrating them. Very limited empirical evidence exists on Agile development and Interaction Design being combined in practice. In order to better understand how these approaches are combined in practice, a multiple-case study of Agile teams working with Interaction Designers was performed. In the paper, we present a set of ten lessons learned from these studies.

What publications metadata tell us about the evolution of a scientific community: the case of the Brazilian human---computer interaction conference series

Human–computer interaction (HCI) is a research field which engages different disciplines, interest groups and communities, and which has emerged in different countries at different times. To understand how the HCI research community has evolved in Brazil, this paper applies data and visual analytics to its main conference series, the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems, henceforth IHC. We have explored the metadata of all 340 full papers published in the 14 editions of IHC. Our goal was to investigate the evolution of the Brazilian HCI community so we can raise the level of “self-knowledge” and thus discuss strategies that can further help develop this research community. From our analysis, we could understand more deeply the authorship profile of our community and how it has changed over time, the co-authorship networks evolution, the prominent institutions and states, the reference profile and the research topics over time. We hope that this paper will contribute to inspire other scientific communities to analyze themselves, and encourage their own discussions.

Agile Usability Patterns for UCD Early Stages

The integration between agile methods and UCD has been addressed by several authors in recent years. However, a gap remains regarding how the practices have been described, lacking a standard that both designers and agile practitioners can understand and apply.

Designing online help systems for reflective users

Empirical studies have revealed that most users are dissatisfied with current help systems. One of the causes for many of the problems found in help systems is a lack of coupling between the process for creating online help and the human-computer interaction design of the application. In this paper, we present a method for building online help based on design models according to a Semiotic Engineering approach. We argue that there may be important benefits to the users if designers communicate their design vision, and we also point at the need to change current design practices to encourage creative and intelligent use of computer applications. We show how this proposal opens a direct communication channel from designers to users, and we hope this will contribute to introducing this new culture.

HCI education in brazil: challenges and opportunities

HCI Education in Brazil has come a long way. Since 1999, the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC) included HCI in its reference curriculum for its Computing courses. Since then, the community has discussed the perspective of the area in our country. From 2010 to this day, we have held a series of workshops on HCI Education, called WEIHC, as a permanent discussion forum within the Brazilian HCI conference, IHC. We report here the results of the WEIHC discussions and of two surveys, conducted in 2009 and in 2012, to help us assess the status of HCI Education in Brazil. Despite the advances of the Brazilian HCI community, our surveys show that we still face some important challenges. We should curate existing teaching material to further enhance collaboration among professors, to increase the quality of our courses, and to broaden HCI awareness across all related departments.

Charting the Landscape of HCI Education in Brazil

One of the issues the Brazilian HCI community has paid great attention to is HCI education in the country. One of the efforts has been to understand, through the use of surveys, how HCI has been taught in Brazil. So far, two reports on HCI education profile in Brazil have been presented: one from 2009 that described HCI courses being taught, and another from 2012 that was in response to a SIGCHI demand and targeted a broader audience, not taking into account specificities of the Brazilian context. Therefore, the need for an updated analysis of HCI education in Brazil was identified and a new survey applied. In this paper we present the initial analysis of the results of this survey and delineate what HCI courses have been offered at undergraduate or graduate levels around the country and their topics they cover.

Understanding the UX designer's role within agile teams

User-Centered Design spends a considerable effort on research and analysis before development begins. On the other hand, Agile methods strive to deliver small sets of software features to customers as fast as possible in short iterations. Whereas the two methodologies have tensions regarding requirements gathering and upfront design, they also share similarities. For instance, both approaches are iterative and customer focused. However, there is little guidance on how to integrate these two perspectives and a lack of understanding with respect to the User Experience (UX) Designers role in an agile environment. Based on four ethnographically-informed studies in two large companies, we aim at providing a better understanding of the integration of Agile development and UX Design by describing the different roles that a UX Designer plays within an Agile environment.

Usability Evaluation Practices within Agile Development

Despite having different underlying concepts, agile methods and User-Centered Design aim ultimately at producing high quality software. Aiming at providing better understanding on how usability evaluation is addressed within agile environments, we carried out multiple-case studies in two large IT companies. On the one hand, our studies corroborate the literature with regards to the execution of usability inspection evaluations on lightweight prototypes, taking advantage of the iterative nature of Agile. On the other hand, we observed contrary to the literature that this iterative nature of Agile has not facilitated the execution of user testing sessions. Furthermore, we noticed that it is extremely difficult to perform traditional user testing sessions due to the tight schedules inherent to Agile. Finally, we describe a set of practices that can help improve specific artifacts in different stages of an agile process in order to successfully evaluate software product usability.

Alternativas de Ajuda On-line para Ambientes de Aprendizagem Colaborativa

In the presence of the actual world context, the importance of knowing the technological resources and making use of them to improve the performance of human activities is realized. Educat ion cannot be laid aside of this reality, on the contrary, it has to be allied and seek for resources to improve even more the process of teaching and learn ing through Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Thus, the dof Araucaria/PR, through the Educational Technology Project, has pro vided access to these resources establishing informatics laboratories, ev aluating and reorganizing the used method, as an example, the accomplishment of the Leader-Teacher function related to the laboratory monitor one. Resumo. Diante do contexto do mundo atual, percebe-se a imp ortância de conhecer os recursos tecnologicos e fazer uso deste s para melhorar o desempenho das atividades humanas. A educacao nao pficar a margem desta realidade, ao contrario, deve buscar meios de aprimorar o processo de ensino e aprendizagem por meio das Tecnologias da I nformacao e Comunicacao (TICs). Assim, o municipio de Araucari a/PR, atraves do Projeto de Tecnologia Educacional, tem viabilizado o acesso a estes recursos com a implantacao de laboratorios de informatica, ae reorganizando os metodos empregados, como por exemplo, a implemen tacao da funcao de Professor-orientador em detrimento a funcao do moni tor de laboratorio.