Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

This keynote paper argues for an increased understanding of the various roles involved in the development work to be able to achieve the goal of developing increased usability. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has for a long time been arguing for the sake of the users, but to be able to deliver methods, tools and processes that better fit the needs of developers we should study and understand development work to a larger extent. This paper discusses what HCI and software engineering contributes to each other’s disciplines as well as what research contributes to practice. This also means an increased understanding of what research that counts in the academic context. Finally I argue that research should focus more on real problems of real development work, rather than on research that is easily publishable.

Papers in HCI play different roles, whether to inspire, solve industrial problems or further the science of HCI. There is a potential conflict between the different views, and a danger that different forms of validity are assumed by author and reader — deliberately or accidentally.

This paper reviews some of the issues in this complex area and makes practical recommendations. In particular, the paper introduces the term “cross-validity” to help make explicit the issues, problems and means to tackle them.

The purpose of ARINC 661 specification [1] is to define interfaces to a Cockpit Display System (CDS) used in any types of aircraft installations. ARINC 661 provides precise information for communication protocol between application (called User Applications) and user interface components (called widgets) as well as precise information about the widgets themselves. However, in ARINC 661, no information is given about the behaviour of these widgets and about the behaviour of an application made up of a set of such widgets. This paper presents the results of the application of a formal description technique to the various elements of ARINC 661 specification within an industrial project. This formal description technique called Interactive Cooperative Objects defines in a precise and non-ambiguous way all the elements of ARINC 661 specification. The application of the formal description techniques is shown on an interactive application called MPIA (Multi Purpose Interactive Application). Within this application, we present how ICO are used for describing interactive widgets, User Applications and User Interface servers (in charge of interaction techniques). The emphasis is put on the model-based management of the feel of the applications allowing rapid prototyping of the external presentation and the interaction techniques. Lastly, we present the CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tool supporting the formal description technique and its new extensions in order to deal with large scale applications as the ones targeted at by ARINC 661 specification.

The Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of Hospitals deals with patients in life critical conditions. The Intensive Care Information System (ICS) can therefore provide extremely important information to support medical doctors’ (MDs) decisions. For instance, it is critical to manage well information about the evolution of a large amount of infections over time, about the antibiotics administered to each patient, and the impact on his/her life condition. Good quality information and interaction in such an extreme environment is therefore critical for helping MDs target well medicines to patients. This paper describes the initial stages of a project aiming at improving a real ICS, in particular from the interaction point of view, taking into account the stringent usability requirements from the MDs. Through a validated low definition prototype of the infection module of ICS, the paper proposes innovative active ways of providing suggestions to MDs on what actions to take.

Usability evaluation methods are a battery of techniques for assessing the usability of interactive systems or of proposed interactive systems. This paper describes a new evaluation method, particularly appropriate for evaluating safety critical and high quality user interfaces. The method can also be used for informing HCI research. The method is applied when a specification is available of an interactive system, or when a system (or prototype) is working.

Interdisciplinary work groups have proved to be one of the best practices (in terms of efficiency) in modern organizations. Large applications have many different users who can play different roles with responsibilities and rights depending on such roles. There are so many roles, groups, relationships among them, tasks, and collaborations, that it is very difficult to develop an application without gathering all this information in a proper way. This paper describes a modelling approach supported by a graphical notation, which makes the representation of such information easier to analyse and manage. The goal is to provide a complete and integrated approach to model collaborative interactive systems.

The industry nowadays is showing an increasing interest towards an extended interactive television experience, called participation television. This increasing interactivity brings the creation of such television events closer to the creation of regular software as we know it for personal computers and mobile devices. In this paper we report on our work in model-driven development of one kind of such interactive television shows, staged participatory multimedia events. More specifically, this work reports on the domain-specific language we created to model these events and the generation of abstract prototypes. These interactive prototypes are built using web-languages and can be used to perform early evaluation.

Nowadays, the claim that a human-computer interface is user friendly, must be supported by a formal usability experiment. Due to its inherent complexity, this is particularly true when developing a multimodal interface. For such a rich user interface, there is a lack of support for automated testing and observing, so in preparation of its formal evaluation a lot of time is spent to adapt the programming code itself. Based on NiMMiT, which is a high-level notation to describe and automatically execute multimodal interaction techniques, we propose in this paper an easy way for the interaction designer to collect and log data related to the user experiment. Inserting ’probes’ and ’filters’ in NiMMiT interaction diagrams is indeed more efficient than editing the code of the interaction technique itself. We will clarify our approach as applied during a concrete user experiment.

The cognitive dimensions framework is a conceptual framework aimed at characterising features of interactive systems that are strongly influential upon their effective use. As such the framework facilitates the critical assessment and design of a wide variety of information artifacts. Although the framework has proved to be of considerable interest to researchers and practitioners, there has been little research examining how easily the dimensions used by it can be consistently applied. The work reported in this paper addresses this problem by examining an approach to the systematic application of dimensions and assessing its success empirically. The findings demonstrate a relatively successful approach to validating the systematic application of some concepts found in the cognitive dimensions framework.

We formally specify the interpretation stage in a dual state space human-computer interaction cycle. This is done by extending / reorganising our previous cognitive architecture. In particular, we focus on shape related aspects of the interpretation process associated with device input prompts. A cash-point example illustrates our approach. Using the SAL model checking environment, we show how the extended cognitive architecture facilitates detection of prompt-shape induced human error.