Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

As the elder population continues to increase throughout the world, there is a tremendous need for technologies that will keep elders healthy and self-sufficient in their homes. Ubiquitous, smart home technologies can fulfill this role, but a thorough understanding of elders’ routines, lifestyles, and home environments is required in order to develop effective aids. This paper describes our research approach, which evolved from stories related in household interviews (‘tales’), ethnographic observation of elders’ routines and environments (‘tours’), analysis of artefacts (‘tools’) and finally interactive performances (‘troupes’) to convey and elicit feedback about the capabilities of future home technologies for the elderly. This combination of methods revealed a range of user values, behaviours, coping styles, and requirements for ubiquitous technology that would otherwise have been difficult to gather in this domain of ubiquitous, ‘invisible’ computing.

This paper describes the re-design of the user interface and the interaction for the PDA-based (Personal Digital Assistant) system . The aim with the system is to help people with Parkinson’s disease to a better life by supporting them in their day-to-day struggle with their chronic illness. In the paper we discuss the re-design — the process and the resulting user interface. The focus is on the evaluation of an earlier version of the system and how that led up to an improved user interface through user-centred systems design (UCSD). The paper also discusses how a practitioner can accomplish UCSD in the context of product development and consultant work.

Trust has a direct impact on the extent to which citizens engage with public and community services. This paper advances a framework which seeks to support HCI designers and managers in promoting ICT-mediated citizen engagement with public services through a strategy of trust promotion. The framework is based upon an analysis of evidence from large-scale community surveys which demonstrate a significant relationship between levels of user trust and users’ experience of public services and reveals experiential factors that promote users’ trust.

We present the results of a study of diagnostics work in the marine industry, with the purpose of exploring design implications for remote diagnostics. We divide diagnostics work in three analytical categories, called ‘defining the problem’, ‘investigating cause and solving the problem’, and ‘involving central experts’. The three main characteristics of these categories are; the importance of being co-located with each other and the boat, the collaborative practice, and the reliance of local knowledge. Against this background, we suggest a decentralized approach to remote diagnostics, which focuses on the local service technician. The decentralized approach suggested contrasts our research from the prevailing centralized model of remote diagnostics, in which the local technician plays a minor role.

In dynamic ubiquitous environments, end users may need to create services by causing devices or resources to interoperate together in ad-hoc circumstances. In general, users can find this kind of process hard to manage. At the same time, existing UI architectures are not well suited to supporting such activities. It is proposed that a good basis for addressing these and related problems in a principled, scaleable way is the principle of Direct Combination (DC). The principle is summarized, and analytical arguments are presented that predict that DC can reduce the amount of search required by the user. Other things being equal, such a reduction in search would be expected to offer interactions which are faster, less frustrating, and impose less mental load on the user. We present a proof-of-concept implementation, and a small-scale evaluation of a DC interface. Within the limitations of a preliminary evaluation, consistent support is offered across several measures for the analytical predictions.

This paper introduces the concept of a to describe the eye behaviour of users searching with different tasks across multiple sites. To validate the concept, we present results from an eye tracking study of four common tasks on three different Web portals. The findings show a consistent search geometry that describes eye behaviour across the different sites and tasks. The geometry illustrates that a small set of page regions account for a large proportion of eye movements. The results are briefly discussed in relation to theories of information foraging and information scent.

One of the challenges confronting website designers is to provide effective navigational support. Supplemental navigation tools such as search, indexes and sitemaps are frequently included on websites. However, due to a lack of guidance for designers a proliferation of designs has evolved leaving users confused about the role and value of each particular tool. This paper reports an empirical investigation into the expectations of users regarding the purpose and design of supplemental navigation tools. Expectations are then compared with a survey of the current utilization of these tools in major commercial websites. The study establishes a relationship between certain types of information goals and the selection of search and sitemap tools.

This article introduces the Complexity of Interaction Sequences model (CIS). CIS describes the structure of interaction techniques and the SimCIS simulator uses these descriptions to predict their performance in the context of an interaction sequence. The model defines the complexity of an interaction technique as a measure of its effectiveness within a given context. We tested CIS to compare three interaction techniques: fixed unimanual palettes, fixed bimanual palettes and toolglasses. The model predicts that the complexity of both palettes depends on interaction sequences, while toolglasses are less context-dependent. CIS also predicts that fixed bimanual palettes outperform the other two techniques. Predictions were tested empirically with a controlled experiment and confirmed the hypotheses. We argue that, in order to be generalizable, experimental comparisons of interaction techniques should include the concept of context sensitivity. CIS is a step in this direction as it helps predict the performance of interaction techniques according to the context of use.

Designing interactive computer systems involves relating informal understandings of practice to the formal language and notations of the computer. For interactive systems that support certain types of ‘knowledge work’, this relationship is mirrored in the user interface. For example, the users of spreadsheets, aircraft flight management systems, or even domestic heating controllers, can find themselves having to relate their informal understanding of what is required to the notations embodied in such tools. The benefit of effectively utilising these capabilities is considerable, however it requires the use of abstractions and pre-planning, which can impose considerable cognitive burdens on the user.

A key design issue for such innovations is to understand how a new system can be integrated into its environment. These considerations may be critical to the uptake of the system by its intended users. In addition, such technologies commonly promote a qualitative shift in working practices that can challenge the value of traditional contextual analysis assessments.

This paper reports on a study to support the redesign of a novel tool that is intended for use by authors of highly interactive DVDs. The tool provides users with powerful abstractions allowing them to radically extend the interactivity available in the medium of DVD. The investigation shows how contextual studies can be enhanced by combining them with analytic methods to provide an efficient practical framework that is suitable to support successive design assessments.

In this paper, we present a study which aims at designing a locomotion assistance device that can deliver semantic information about its surrounding environment at any time. As a first step towards this goal, we introduce an original model suited for the description of building structure, and we present an algorithm that exploits these descriptions. Then, we explain how it is possible to link semantics to structure. Finally, we expose some research directions for user positioning and human-computer interface design.