Rogerio Abreu De Paula

Building Socially Connected Skilled Teams to Accomplish Complex Tasks

Solving todays problems demands more than the effort of an individual, however, brilliant mind. Collaboration and team work are fundamental skills for tackling such problems. The ability of team members to work together and communicate with one another thus becomes an uppermost concern. In this context, to assemble an effective team requires an approach that goes beyond the analysis of individual skills. This paper proposes and examines the problem that takes into account different skill attributes and social ties to build an interconnected team. Our proposed solution is evaluated by means of building one team to defeat an opposite team defined in the same social network. Our experimental results show that our algorithms produces meaningful socially collaborative skilled teams.

Web accessibility snapshot: an effort to reveal coding guidelines conformance

In the last decades, the Web has grown from dozens of webpages to the current 13.5 billion pages. This growth was not followed by a major conformance to markup coding guidelines. This impacts negatively the access of people with disabilities to the vast socio-economic-cultural transformations the Web engenders. For example, a form field without the proper label markup is an accessibility barrier for blind users. In this context, this work presents a study involving the Alexa.coms top 1,000 popular websites and a sample of random 1,000 websites to verify and contrast the conformance of these disjoint sets with the accessibility markup guidelines. The initiative proposed in this paper is the first iteration of the Web Accessibility Snapshot (WAS) project, which will from now on present regular updates on the numbers regarding the status of Web accessibility. With the presented results, one expects to support accessibility professionals, researchers, and practitioners by providing up-to-date information. Beyond that, we expect governments and other accessibility governance agency to consider the provided information when designing programs for fostering and enforcing the conformance to existing accessibility regulations and laws accordingly.

Data-Driven Analytical Tools for Characterization of Productivity and Service Quality Issues in IT Service Factories

In this article, we propose an analytical tool, named the Workload Profile Diagnosis (WPD) method, to evaluate the performance and quality of incident management (IM) systems in information technology (IT) service factories. Based on the normalization of ticket assignment delay and resolution time by their respective service-level agreement, the method computes and plots the spreading of ticket data on a log-log chart. By comparing the actual and desired distribution values in specific areas, the WPD method diagnoses specific problems and issues in the performance of IM systems such as resource and skill allocation and abnormal behavior, and identifies opportunities for automated resolution or assignment of tickets, increases or decreases in the resources and skills needed, and ultimately aims to strike a better balance between productivity and service quality. In addition to an in-depth description of the WPD method, this article presents its application in the diagnostics of four service pools of a large IT service factory. An empirical study conducted in the IT service factory shows that most of the problems identified by the WPD method were indeed present in the service pools, therefore providing evidence of the validity of the WPD method. We conclude discussing how managers can use the method to detect and evaluate transformational opportunities to increase productivity and service quality in a systematic manner.

Designing an enterprise social tool for cross-boundary communication, coordination, and information sharing

This paper discusses the design of a social tool for cross-boundary communication, coordination, and information sharing in a large organization. Based on insights and requirements gathered in qualitative and quantitative studies conducted within the organization, the Live Corkboard, a virtual message board system enhanced with community features and text/history search is proposed as a tool to enhance communication, group awareness, and information sharing and reuse. We describe the requirements for our tool as well as how they influenced our design. The research was conducted in a large IT services delivery company which has recently changed its organizational structure from a customer-centered to a competency-centered model. Focus group evaluation results suggest that the tool will be useful to the employees in the organization.

Abstraction Levels as Support for UX Design of User’s Interaction Logs

User interaction logging is a powerful tool for user behavior studies, usability testing, and system metrics analysis. It may also be applied in large data contexts, such as social networks analysis, helping data scientists to understand social patterns. Data scientists, User Experience (UX) designers, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) practitioners, and software engineers have been performing the analysis of this kind of data to obtain knowledge regarding the source system’s usage. User interaction log data, however, can also be critical for final users themselves. They can use interaction log data, for example, (i) to revisit his own interaction path, redoing his steps that lead to a relevant insight or discovery; (ii) to learn from someone else’s interaction path new ways to perform a given task; (iii) or even to analyze critical steps of a process supported by the source system. The need for final users to consume interaction log data is presenting significant challenges for UX researchers. Influenced by Semiotic Engineering, a HCI theory that views human-computer interaction as a form of human communication between designers and users mediated by a computer system, we propose three user interaction log abstraction levels - strategic, tactical, and operational - to frame and guide user interaction logs’ UX design. In this paper, we discuss how those abstraction levels can be used as UX design guidelines and present some research questions to be explored - how source system captures interaction log is central for log analysis strategy and how a strategic level can be identified thought the analysis of interaction logs data from other abstraction levels.

Understanding Fiado : Informal Credit in Brazil

This paper will explore insights gathered from fieldwork activities in the Northeast Brazil to design a financial application to facilitate access to credit. We observed the everyday financial practices of small merchants, their social physical networks and mechanisms to promote trust in those communities. We observed a particular kind of transaction that was common amongst our participants - called Fiado. Fiado transactions are a store credit practice in which merchants sell products to a customer based on trust that the customer will pay for it in the future. The Financial app aims to assist small merchants to manage their Fiado and their business.

A Validation Study of a Visual Analytics Tool with End Users

In this paper we describe an user evaluation that aimed to understand how a group of endusers interpret a visual analytics tool in the context of service delivery. It is common for service factories to have an organization devoted to handle incidents. Many incident management systems have strict controls on how fast incidents should be handled, often subjected to penalties when targets are not met.We call Time-Bounded Incident Management (TBIM) those systems, which require clearly defined incident resolution times. In our project, research scientists proposed a method and a visual representation named Workload Profile Chart (WPC) that had as primary goal to understand the area of incident management in a service delivery department. The objective of this visual representation is to help characterizing the performance of TBIM systems and diagnosing major issues such as resource and skill allocation problems, abnormal behavior, and incident characteristics. Researchers wanted to understand if end-users, the quality analysts (QAs), would comprehend the charts and would be able to use them to identify problems and propose effective improvement actions related to TBIM activities. The study was conducted with ten QAs of a service delivery department of a IT company based in Brazil. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistical and qualitative methods. As a result, participants were mainly guided by the axes titles and chart legends to interpret the visualizations, and not always understood what kind of data the chart was displaying. Those results served as insights of how QAs think when analyzing TBIM information in a service delivery department and what improvements in the visual representation tool may be proposed to facilitate their activity. At last we identified evidences of how to design better visual analytics tools based on participant’s perceptions and interpretations of color differences and verbal information in chart labels and legend.

Designing for the 'emerged' markets

forgot my Portuguese.” But, in the end, this served me well, as this lack of grounding enabled me to approach my own country from a certain distance, while maintaining enough insider knowledge to make appropriate cultural translations. Positioned as such, I was interested in finding better ways to account for the dynamics, idiosyncrasies, contradictions, and interdependencies of the emerging markets. Equipped with the theoretical and empirical tools I’d acquired in the U.S., my Brazilian background, and a “safe” distance from Brazil’s current reality, I set out to investigate various segments of Brazilian society, from poor communities in Bahia, to natives in the middle of the country, to vertical shantytowns in downtown São Paulo. My mission was to get a better grasp of what the emerging middle class, which at that point was moving out of poverty, was really about. In so doing, my aim was to recast how the company I was working for was approaching these populations and then design products accordingly. Let me start by tracing the arc of my research career. After an extended stay in the U.S., I returned to Brazil seven years ago as an “embedded researcher” (an allusion to embedded journalism), an ethnographic researcher working within a product group with the mission of unveiling new business opportunities and the wonders of the “emerging markets.” Together with colleagues stationed across the hitherto invisible markets of China, India, Latin America, and the Middle East, we set out to explore, investigate, design, and document the latent growth opportunities in these regions. For the most part, that meant designing new products to address such emerging-market opportunities. When I arrived in Brazil, at first I could not fully make sense of its realities. Although I grew up there as traditional middle class (I will return to this later), my time in the U.S. shifted my frame of reference as I became embedded in everyday North American life. Also, while I was away, Brazil went through a major socioeconomic transformation (particularly of economic stabilization and economic growth). I returned as a strange hybrid. On the one hand, I had never become entirely American. On the other hand, I was disconnected from the changes that Brazilian society had undergone during the years I was away. As my friends and I often joke, “I In the past 10 years or so, emerging markets have become the growth engine of major North American and European multinational organizations. Going after the untapped consumer market created by the “base of the pyramid” (referring to low-income populations), these organizations established local research labs, product teams, and design groups; shifted management oversees; and reallocated resources to best address the needs and desires of these populations. While we can list a number of successful products that cropped up from these efforts (in particular, those that were able to “trickle up” to the mature markets), I believe we have yet to fully realize the potential for innovation and novelty that these regions offer. This is because we have yet to fully grasp how to appreciate the ways in which these populations are emerging. In this column, I offer a few personal takes on how companies have misread these groups and the opportunities they present. I will draw upon my own experiences as a design ethnographer who worked for a large corporation in Brazil to discuss what I consider to be a few major misinterpretations. These center on the following themes: • Emerging markets as a development problem. • Local solutions in global-scale businesses. • “They are just like us.” Designing for the ‘Emerged’ Markets

CoRgI: Cognitive Reasoning Interface

Cognitive systems built with artificial intelligence resources (AI-powered systems) can be defined as software systems that learn at scale from their interaction with humans and environments. That kind of system allows people to augment their cognitive potential in order to harvest insights from huge quantities of data to understand complex situations, make accurate predictions about the future, and anticipate the unintended consequences of actions. These systems evolve naturally from such learning, rather than being explicitly programmed. In this approach, humans and computers work more interconnected to achieve unexpected insights. In order to be useful, an AI-powered system must be aware of the users’ goals, so it can help him/her by bringing contextual information from multiple sources, guiding through the series of tasks associated with the goals. The knowledge structuring is a challenge by itself and it has been the focus of knowledge engineering research. Once the knowledge is structured or organized, the challenge falls on UX researchers to investigate users and their tasks and goals with that structured knowledge. Questions like who the users are, what they want or need to do, in which preferred ways, and what are users’ goals can guide UX research on this matter. We argue that an AI-powered system could infer the user’s goals by observing his/her interactions with different systems and considering its knowledge base – about the user, the group(s) s/he is part of, the applications’ domains, the overall context, etc. Based on fieldwork executed for a project where a knowledge-intensive process is analyzed and discussed with support of an AI-Powered System, we propose the Cognitive Reasoning Interface (CoRgI) framework. This paper presents the fieldwork observation that led to the development of the framework, how we conceptualize the framework, and our initial validation of the framework.

An eye gaze model for seismic interpretation support

Designing systems to offer support to experts during cognitive intensive tasks at the right time is still a challenging endeavor, despite years of research progress in the area. This paper proposes a gaze model based on eye tracking empirical data to identify when a system should proactively interact with the expert during visual inspection tasks. The gaze model derives from the analyses of a user study where 11 seismic interpreters were asked to perform the visual inspection task of seismic images from known and unknown basins. The eye tracking fixation patterns were triangulated with pupil dilations and thinking-aloud data. Results show that cumulative saccadic distances allow identifying when additional information could be offered to support seismic interpreters, changing the visual search behavior from exploratory to goal-directed.