Shah Rukh Humayoun

A three-fold integration framework to incorporate user-centered design into agile software development

We present a framework that incorporates user-centered design (UCD) philosophy into agile software development through a three-fold integration approach: at the process life-cycle level for the selection and application of appropriate UCD methods and techniques in the right places at the right times; at the iteration level for integrating UCD concepts, roles, and activities during each agile development iteration planning; and at the development-environment level for managing and automating the sets of UCD activities through automated tools support. We also present two automated tools--UEMan and TaMUlator, which provide the realization of the development-environment level integration.

From the web of data to a world of action

This paper takes as its premise that the web is a place of action, not just information, and that the purpose of global data is to serve human needs. The paper presents several component technologies, which together work towards a vision where many small micro-applications can be threaded together using automated assistance to enable a unified and rich interaction. These technologies include data detector technology to enable any text to become a start point of semantic interaction; annotations for web-based services so that they can link data to potential actions; spreading activation over personal ontologies, to allow modelling of context; algorithms for automatically inferring typing of web-form input data based on previous user inputs; and early work on inferring task structures from action traces. Some of these have already been integrated within an experimental web-based (extended) bookmarking tool, Snip!t, and a prototype desktop application On Time, and the paper discusses how the components could be more fully, yet more openly, linked in terms of both architecture and interaction. As well as contributing to the goal of an action and activity-focused web, the work also exposes a number of broader issues, theoretical, practical, social and economic, for the Semantic Web.

The WORKPAD User Interface and Methodology: Developing Smart and Effective Mobile Applications for Emergency Operators

In complex emergency/disaster scenarios, teams from various emergency-response organizations collaborate in order to achieve a common goal. The use of smart mobile devices and applications in these scenarios can improve this collaboration dynamically; and poses interesting challenges, such as user mental attention, small screen size, unavailability of reliable network, reduced power, and battery consumption. So, to design and develop interactive applications to be used in mobile and pervasive scenarios requires novel methodologies which combine user-centred design approaches and software engineering approaches tailed for distributed architectures. In this paper, we outline the methodology, adopted successfully in the European WORKPAD project, and describe the work done from getting the requirements to developing the interface of the desired system.

UEMan: A tool to manage user evaluation in development environments

One of the challenges in software development is to collect and analyze the end users feedback in an effective and efficient manner. In this paper we present a tool to manage user evaluation alongside the process of software development. The tool is based on the idea that user evaluation should be managed iteratively from within the integrated development environment (IDE) in order to provide high quality user interface. The main capabilities include creating the experiment object as part of the software project; deriving development tasks from the analysis of evaluation data; and tracing these tasks to and from the code. Further, we provide a library to enable development of Java aspects for creation of automatic measures to increase the body of the evaluation data. Using this tool, development teams can manage user-centered design (UCD) activities at the IDE level, hence developing software products with an adequate level of usability.

A dynamic framework for multi-view task modeling

We propose a dynamic way to model task structures from multi viewpoints at different abstraction levels. For this, we provide a multi-view task modeling framework that defines a two-layered approach: at conceptual-level specific framework concepts for providing a conceptual foundation to model and structure tasks at different abstraction levels; and at representation-level through a formal task modeling language. The motivation behind this is decoupling the complexity of the underlying system behavior and business logic, and giving a comprehensive picture from all perspectives. The framework concepts and the language are customizable and extendible, thus enabling the framework to be used for creating task models for different purposes, from system analysis to performing usability evaluation. We provide details of a case study in which we successfully used the framework for conducting task model-based usability evaluation.

A model-based approach to ongoing product evaluation

Evaluating interface usability and system functionality is time-consuming and effort-intense. The short time-span involved in development iterations, such as those in agile development, makes it challenging for software teams to perform ongoing interface usability evaluation and system functionality testing. We propose a way to perform product ongoing evaluation, thus enabling software teams to perform interface usability evaluation alongside automated system functionality testing. We use formal task models, created in our defined TaMoGolog task modeling language, to conduct product evaluation experiments through TaMUlator. TaMUlator is a tool we developed for use at the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) level. Our case study revealed that software teams can easily engage in system evaluation by using TaMUlator on an iterative basis.

Task-based User-System Interaction

In current electronic environments, the ever-increasing amount of personal information, means that users focus more on managing their information rather than using it to accomplish their objectives. To overcome this problem, a user task-based interactive environment is needed to help users focus on tasks they wish to perform rather than spending more time on managing their personal information. In this paper, we present parts of our on-going work on task-based user-system interaction, which highlights the need for a shift from an information-centric to a task-centric environment. More precisely, we look into issues relating to modeling user tasks that arise when users interact with the environment to fulfill their goals through these sets of tasks.

Using a High Level Formal Language for Task Model-Based Usability Evaluation

Evaluating usability is a challenge in many development projects. We propose a formal high-level task modeling language, called TaMoGolog, to define task model-based usability evaluation. TaMoGolog provides a well-defined syntax and semantics, enables precondition axioms of tasks, states postcondition effects to variables due to tasks execution, provides a rich set of operators for constructing task models of complex system behavior in an accurate and unambiguous form, and gives the facility to express domain knowledge in resulting task models. We suggest a framework to use TaMoGolog and describe the life-cycle for evaluating the usability of software products through formal task models. We further present a tool, called TaMUlator, to manage and automate the proposed evaluation life-cycle at the integrated development environment (IDE) level.

Usability- and {Accessibility}-{Focused} {Requirements} {Engineering}

A method for analysing emotion and motivation in requirements engineering (RE) is described. The method extends personal RE where require‐ ments are for individual users and their needs. Theories from the psychology of emotion and motivation are introduced and applied in a top-down pathway moti‐ vated by system goals to influence users, and a bottom-up scenario-based path to analyse affective situations which might be produced by user-oriented RE. Use of agent technology in storyboards and scenario analysis of affective situations is described and illustrated with case studies in health informatics for persuasive technology applications.