Plinio Thomaz Aquino

EEG signal classification in usability experiments

The affective computing aims to detect emotional states during the interaction between the user and the machine allowing the use of this information in decision-making processes. EEG signals related to emotional states can be applied to the context of software usability providing more resources to the validation process and the identification of the degree of user satisfaction. This work aims to establish a relationship between EEG signals and the user opinion about the usability of some Facebook privacy features. Based on the assumption that there are variation in brain activity during the execution of tasks labeled as “easy” or “difficult”, a performance evaluation was done based on a Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifiers. The Mean Power Spectral Density, in 7 frequency bands, from 8 electrodes in F, C, P, and O areas were used as features. The classification rates showed a small advantage of the SVM when all the 28 variables were used. However, when the 13 variables pointed by the Mann-Whitney U test were used, LDA showed good discrimination capability. The electrodes in F and C areas, related with cognition and motor functions, rejected null hypothesis in almost all frequency bands during the execution of the tasks, showing that it is possible to recognize the studied emotional states. Despite the fact that this was a preliminary study, it showed the feasibility of using the EEG as a potential source of information to be added to software usability testing.

Personas como modelo de usuários de serviços de governo eletrônico

Efforts towards Internet use as a means for public services are definitely increasing worldwide. In Sao Paulo State, Brazil, usability is considered an important factor to citizen-centric e-government. The dispersed nature of e-government development, by many different teams and the broad audience of internet makes user modeling an essential task for communicating user characteristics to designers. The persona modeling technique is a valuable tool to this task.. This paper presents the process of obtaining personas from user data in e-poupatempo and their use for design and usability evaluation.

Usability Evaluation as Quality Assurance of E-Government Services

This paper describes the role of usability evaluation as quality assurance of e-government services. Usability evaluation intends to identify difficulties experienced by a user when interacting with a computer interface. Usability evaluation is a key issue in assessing the return from investment in government sites, as it can measure how the services impact the citizen and is a significant source of requirements for design reviews of present services. This paper describes the creation of a Laboratory for Human-Computer Interaction (LabIHC) devoted to assess Sao Paulo State, Brazil, government services usability. This Laboratory evaluates about 250 users per day using different e-government services and can produce accurate reports on usability problems. The paper describes LabIHC’s pluralistic evaluation methodology, composed of four different techniques, as well as the set of recommendations that were derived from LabIHC results for e-government services.

Creating Personas to Reuse on Diversified Projects

This paper presents an automatized creation process for Personas user modeling focus on minimize stereotyping and to increase Persona’s reuse on many different projects. This creation process has focus on similarity and automation which, are some main issues of variation from project to project. We discuss this process applying it on two different projects. First is a medical web system (HCI-M) and the second one is a human-robot interaction project with Sony AIBO pet robot (HRI-P). Results show that the process makes possible to minimize the stereotyping and also we reuse Personas from project HCI-M to help us on planning phase of project HRI-P which, turns it practicable.

Relationship Between the Scientific and Traditional Software Engineering Considering the Ethical Aspects of Human-Computer Interaction

Software engineering (SE) is a discipline that studies process, methods and tools to build a software. The SE applied in scientific experiments tries to insert those process, methods and tools to build an academic research. One relevant aspect when applying the SE in scientific experiments is the evolvement of humans during the experimentation process. The discipline that studies computer domains involving humans is the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The HCI is a field that collaborates with the ethical processes of SE. This article demonstrates the relationship of the concepts and how HCI collaborates with the evolution of the ethical aspects of the traditional SE, and its application to scientific computing, including the some of the ethics applied in medicine.

Mobile interface for neuroprosthesis control aiming tetraplegic users

This article proposes the development of a mobile interface for controlling a Neuroprosthesis, designed to restore grasp patterns, aiming tetraplegics users at C5 and C6 levels. Human Computer Interface paradigms and usability concepts guide its planning and development to garantee the quality of users interaction with the system and thus, the sucess and controlability of the neuroprostheses. The number of screens and menus were optimized, thus the user may feel the interface as more intuitive, leading to fast learning and increasing the trust on it.

Automatic Deformations Detection in Internet Interfaces: ADDII

Developers have been trying to create uniform and consistent webpages in the different browsers available in the market. Known as Crossbrowser issue, it affects pages in different ways, on its functionalities and visually aspects and sometimes not related to the source code. Using screenshot and image comparison algorithms, this paper presents a technique for automated detection of visual deformations in web pages using a tool developed during the research called Automatic Deformations Detection in Internet Interfaces (ADDII).

Automatic interface optimization through random exploration of available elements

The Keystroke-Level Model (KLM) is an interface evaluation method that use as metric the time needed to perform an executed action to complete a given task. The description used in KLM is very similar to the formalism that Markov Decision Process (MDP) uses to describe a domain, in which an artificial agent must perform a sequence of actions in order to solve a problem. This work presents a way to model a users interaction with an interface using MDP combined with KLM in order to optimize a set of parameters and find the best set of interface components for a user. Results show that by changing the metrics of the KLM, the MDP finds different solutions that may be combined to generate an interface tailored for a given user.

Agile Web Development with Scrum: A User Experience Based Approach Using Linguistic Metamodel.

In this work it is proposed an approach based on user experience design for the agile development of web-based software, using the language metamodel. The main motivation was the observation of evidences, in market studies and papers from other researchers, of proportional differences between the usage of agile methods versus methods based on user experience design. This research proposes an approach for the development of web applications using SCRUM, based on UX design, offering the metamodel as a tool to tackle communication problems during this process. The experiments were done in academic and industrial contexts in order to validate and check viability/applicability of the proposed approach: In the academic context, workshops were made for the practical application of the developed approach and information regarding the experiment was collected by means of questionnaires. It was demonstrated that the proposed approach may be viable and may be applied in contexts where it is possible to adopt all stablished recommendations and principles so that the integration between SCRUM and UX happens. It was also used as a facilitating tool, for the integration process, the linguistic metamodel to permeate all existing communication processes, reducing communicational noise related to omission, generalization and distortion of information.

Small Brazilian Business and IT Governance: Viability and Case Study

Small companies have potential to be agile, flexible and informal - this is possible because such companies are usually formed by few members (up to 9 people – statistic average in Brazil). This usually creates more synergy among these professionals because they incline to have more than a single role inside the company. Therefore, it is understandable that those professionals should multi-task, splitting their working hours among different kinds of demands: what may cause difficulties in planning, development, verification, and improvement of internal processes. This article brings a case study where the COBIT 5.0 toolkit (Process Assessment Model) was used to identify internal processes that needed improvement within the studied company. In order to improve the selected processes, ISO/IEC 12207 was tailored concerning company’s needs. Additionally, it was applied a continuous improvement cycle – PDCA and it was also proposed the adoption of an agile method – SCRUM, to integrate internal activities and processes.