Lessons Learned from Customizing and Applying ACTA to Design a Novel Device for Emergency Medical Care

Preclinical patient care is both mentally and physically challenging and exhausting for emergency teams. The teams intensively use medical technology to help the patient on site. However, they must carry and handle multiple heavy medical devices such as a monitor for the patient's vital signs, a ventilator to support an unconscious patient, and a resuscitation device. In an industry project, we aim at developing a combined device that lowers the emergency teams' mental and physical load caused by multiple screens, devices, and their high weight. The focus of this paper is to describe our ideation and requirements elicitation process regarding the user interface design of the combined device. For one year, we applied a fully digital customized version of the Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA) method to systematically elicit the requirements. Domain and requirements engineering experts created a detailed hierarchical task diagram of an extensive emergency scenario, conducted eleven interviews with subject matter experts (SMEs), and executed two design workshops, which led to 34 sketches and three mockups of the combined device's user interface. Cross-functional teams accompanied the entire process and brought together expertise in preclinical patient care, requirements engineering, and medical product development. We report on the lessons learned for each of the four consecutive stages of our customized ACTA process.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 29th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conferenc

Adaptive development and maintenance of user-centric software systems

A software system cannot be developed without considering the various facets of its environment. Stakeholders – including the users that play a central role – have their needs, expectations, and perceptions of a system. Organisational and technical aspects of the environment are constantly changing. The ability to adapt a software system and its requirements to its environment throughout its full lifecycle is of paramount importance in a constantly changing environment. The continuous involvement of users is as important as the constant evaluation of the system and the observation of evolving environments. We present a methodology for adaptive software systems development and maintenance. We draw upon a diverse range of accepted methods including participatory design, software architecture, and evolutionary design. Our focus is on user-centred software systems

Towards the design of a platform for abuse detection in OSNs using multimedial data analysis

Online social networks (OSNs) are becoming increasingly popular every day. The vast amount of data created by users and their actions yields interesting opportunities, both socially and economically. Unfortunately, these online communities are prone to abuse and inappropriate behaviour such as cyber bullying. For victims, this kind of behaviour can lead to depression and other severe problems. However, due to the huge amount of users and data it is impossible to manually check all content posted on the social network. We propose a pluggable architecture with reusable components, able to quickly detect harmful content. The platform uses text-, image-, audio- and video-based analysis modules to detect inappropriate content or high risk behaviour. Domain services aggregate this data and flag user profiles if necessary. Social network moderators need only check the validity of the flagged profiles. This paper reports upon key requirements of the platform, the architectural components and important challenges

Applying a User-centred Approach to Interactive Visualization Design

Analysing users in their context of work and finding out how and why they use different information resources is essential to provide interactive visualisation systems that match their goals and needs. Designers should actively involve the intended users throughout the whole process. This chapter presents a user-centered approach for the design of interactive visualisation systems. We describe three phases of the iterative visualisation design process: the early envisioning phase, the global specification hase, and the detailed specification phase. The whole design cycle is repeated until some criterion of success is reached. We discuss different techniques for the analysis of users, their tasks and domain. Subsequently, the design of prototypes and evaluation methods in visualisation practice are presented. Finally, we discuss the practical challenges in design and evaluation of collaborative visualisation environments. Our own case studies and those of others are used throughout the whole chapter to illustrate various approaches

Human-Centered Approaches in Geovisualization Design: Investigating Multiple Methods Through a Long-Term Case Study

Working with three domain specialists we investigate human-centered approaches to geovisualization following an ISO13407 taxonomy covering context of use, requirements and early stages of design. Our case study, undertaken over three years, draws attention to repeating trends: that generic approaches fail to elicit adequate requirements for geovis application design; that the use of real data is key to understanding needs and possibilities; that trust and knowledge must be built and developed with collaborators. These processes take time but modified human-centred approaches can be effective. A scenario developed through contextual inquiry but supplemented with domain data and graphics is useful to geovis designers. Wireframe, paper and digital prototypes enable successful communication between specialist and geovis domains when incorporating real and interesting data, prompting exploratory behaviour and eliciting previously unconsidered requirements. Paper prototypes are particularly successful at eliciting suggestions, especially for novel visualization. Enabling specialists to explore their data freely with a digital prototype is as effective as using a structured task protocol and is easier to administer. Autoethnography has potential for framing the design process. We conclude that a common understanding of context of use, domain data and visualization possibilities are essential to successful geovis design and develop as this progresses. HC approaches can make a significant contribution here. However, modified approaches, applied with flexibility, are most promising. We advise early, collaborative engagement with data – through simple, transient visual artefacts supported by data sketches and existing designs – before moving to successively more sophisticated data wireframes and data prototypes

Automated user documentation generation based on the Eclipse application model

An application's user documentation, also referred to as the user manual, is one of the core elements required in application distribution. While there exist many tools to aid an application's developer in creating and maintaining documentation on and for the code itself, there are no tools that complement code development with user documentation for modern graphical applications. Approaches like literate programming are not applicable to this scenario, as not a library, but a full application is to be documented to an end-user. Documentation generation on applications up to now was only partially feasible due to the gap between the code and its semantics. The new generation of Eclipse rich client platform developed applications is based on an application model, closing a broad semantic gap between code and visible interface. We use this application model to provide a semantic description for the contained elements. Combined with the internal relationships of the application model, these semantic descriptions are aggregated to well-structured user documentations that comply to the ISO/IEC 26514. This paper delivers a report on the Ecrit research project, where the potentials and limitations of user documentation generation based on the Eclipse application model were investigated.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

The TASTE Toolset: turning human designed heterogeneous systems into computer built homogeneous software.

The TASTE tool-set results from spin-off studies of the ASSERT project, which started in 2004 with the objective to propose innovative and pragmatic solutions to develop real-time software. One of the primary targets was satellite flight software, but it appeared quickly that their characteristics were shared among various embedded systems. The solutions that we developed now comprise a process and several tools ; the development process is based on the idea that real-time, embedded systems are heterogeneous by nature and that a unique UML-like language was not helping neither their construction, nor their validation. Rather than inventing yet another "ultimate" language, TASTE makes the link between existing and mature technologies such as Simulink, SDL, ASN.1, C, Ada, and generates complete, homogeneous software-based systems that one can straightforwardly download and execute on a physical target. Our current prototype is moving toward a marketed product, and sequel studies are already in place to support, among others, FPGA systems

Emerging from the MIST: A Connector Tool for Supporting Programming by Non-programmers

Software development is an iterative process. As user re-quirements emerge software applications must be extended to support the new requirements. Typically, a programmer will add new code to an existing code base of an application to provide a new functionality. Previous research has shown that such extensions are easier when application logic is clearly separated from the user interface logic. Assuming that a programmer is already familiar with the existing code base, the task of writing the new code can be considered to be split into two sub-tasks: writing code for the application logic; that is, the actual functionality of the application; and writing code for the user interface that will expose the functionality to the end user. The goal of this research is to reduce the effort required to create a user interface once the application logic has been created, toward supporting scientists with minimal pro-gramming knowledge to be able to create and modify pro-grams. Using a Model View Controller based architecture, various model components which contain the application logic can be built and extended. The process of creating and extending the views (user interfaces) on these model components is simplified through the use of our Malleable Interactive Software Toolkit (MIST), a tool set an infrastructure intended to simplify the design and extension of dynamically reconfigurable interfaces. This paper focuses on one tool in the MIST suite, a connec-tor tool that enables the programmer to evolve the user interface as the application logic evolves by connecting related pieces of code together; either through simple drag-and-drop interactions or through the authoring of Python code. The connector tool exemplifies the types of tools in the MIST suite, which we expect will encourage collabora-tive development of applications by allowing users to inte-grate various components and minimizing the cost of de-veloping new user interfaces for the combined compo-nents