An investigation into the validation of formalised cognitive dimensions

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.</p

Design as conversation with digital materials

This paper explores Donald Schön's concept of design as a conversation with materials, in the context of designing digital systems. It proposes material utterance as a central event in designing. A material utterance is a situated communication act that depends on the particularities of speaker, audience, material and genre. The paper argues that, if digital designing differs from other forms of designing, then accounts for such differences must be sought by understanding the material properties of digital systems and the genres of practice that surround their use. Perspectives from human-computer interaction (HCI) and the psychology of programming are used to examine how such an understanding might be constructed.</p

Developing formative evaluation for complex interaction

© 2019 IADIS Press. All rights reserved. This paper reports on the development, refinement and use of a design instrument for supporting the exploration of interactive tool design. The distinctive focus of the instrument is that it is intended for interactive tools that go beyond the aim of enabling direct interaction. It is intended to tools that by necessity mediate access to rich complex functionality. We argue that the majority of evaluative instruments that HCI designers have at-hand are not particularly useful in this context. We proposed that alternative concepts are of more relevance, specifically the concepts developed in the Cognitive Dimensions Framework. We have developed an instrument to enable and support the critical assessment of alternative complex interaction designs that is motivated by these concepts. Having described the origins of the tool, the paper then describes how it has been applied in three real world design and development settings. The paper concludes with reflections upon how best to refine, encapsulate and further improve the instrument

Prompt Sapper: A LLM-Empowered Production Tool for Building AI Chains

The emergence of foundation models, such as large language models (LLMs) GPT-4 and text-to-image models DALL-E, has opened up numerous possibilities across various domains. People can now use natural language (i.e. prompts) to communicate with AI to perform tasks. While people can use foundation models through chatbots (e.g., ChatGPT), chat, regardless of the capabilities of the underlying models, is not a production tool for building reusable AI services. APIs like LangChain allow for LLM-based application development but require substantial programming knowledge, thus posing a barrier. To mitigate this, we propose the concept of AI chain and introduce the best principles and practices that have been accumulated in software engineering for decades into AI chain engineering, to systematise AI chain engineering methodology. We also develop a no-code integrated development environment, Prompt Sapper, which embodies these AI chain engineering principles and patterns naturally in the process of building AI chains, thereby improving the performance and quality of AI chains. With Prompt Sapper, AI chain engineers can compose prompt-based AI services on top of foundation models through chat-based requirement analysis and visual programming. Our user study evaluated and demonstrated the efficiency and correctness of Prompt Sapper.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures, accepted to TOSEM 202

Collaborative knowledge building with shared video representations

Online video has become established as a fundamental part of the fabric of the web; widely used by people for information sharing, learning and entertainment. We report results from a design study that explored how people interact to create shared multi-path video representations in a social video environment. The participants created multiple versions of a video by providing alternative and interchangeable scenes that formed different paths through the video content. This multi-path video approach was designed to circumvent limitations of traditionally linear video for use as a shared representation in collaborative knowledge building activities. The article describes how people created video resources in collaborative activities in two different settings. We discuss different modes of working that were observed and outline the specific challenges of using the video medium as shared representation. Finally we demonstrate how an analysis of collaborative dimensions of the shared multi-path video representation can be applied to discuss the design space and to raise the discourse about the usefulness of these representations in knowledge building environments

Improving the Exchange of Lessons Learned in Security Incident Reports: Case Studies in the Privacy of Electronic Patient Records

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link. This is an Open Access article.The increasing use of Electronic Health Records has been mirrored by a similar rise in the number of security incidents where con fidencial information has inadvertently been disclosed to third parties. These problems have been compounded by an apparent inability to learn from previous violations; similar security incidents have been observed across Europe, North America and Asia. This has resulted in the loss of con fidence and trust of the public towards the organisations' ability to protect the patients' private information. The Generic Security Template (G.S.T.) has been proposed to communicate security lessons learned from previous security incidents. This paper conducts a series of empirical studies to evaluate the usability of the G.S.T. The first study compares the G.S.T. with the conventional text-based security incident reports. The two methods were compared in term of the users' ability to identify a number of lessons learned from investigations into previous incidents involving the disclosure of healthcare records. The study showed that the graphical approach resulted in higher accuracy in terms of number of correct answers generated by participants. However, subjective feedback raised further questions about the usability of the G.S.T. as the readers of security incident reports try to interpret the lessons that can increase the security of patient data. The second study further evaluates the usability of the G.S.T. using the Cognitive Dimensions and identifi es some aspects that need to be improved