Design exploration: engaging a larger user population

Software designers must understand the domain, work practices, and user expectations before determining requirements or generating initial design mock-ups. Users and other stakeholders are a valuable source of information leading to that understanding. Much work has focused on design approaches that include users in the software development process. These approaches vary from surveys and questionnaires that garner responses from a population of potential users to participatory design processes where representative users are included in the design/development team. The Design Exploration approach retains the remote and asynchronous communication of surveys while making expression of feedback easier by providing users alternatives to textual communication for their suggestions and tacit understanding of the domain. To do this, visual and textual modes of expression are combined to facilitate communication from users to designers while allowing a broad user audience to contribute to software design. One challenge to such an approach is how software designers make use of the potentially overwhelming combination of text, graphics, and other content. The Design Exploration process provides users and other stakeholders the Design Exploration Builder, a construction kit where they create annotated partial designs. The Design Exploration Analyzer is an exploration tool that allows software designers to consolidate and explore partial designs. The Analyzer looks for patterns based on textual analysis of annotations and spatial analysis of graphical designs, to help identify interesting examples and patterns within the collection. Then software designers can use this tool to search and browse within the exploration set in order to better understand the task domain, user expectations and work practices. Evaluation of the tools has shown that users will often work to overcome expression constraints to convey information. Moreover, the mode of expression influences the types of information garnered. Furthermore, including more users results in greater coverage of the information gathered. These results provide evidence that Design Exploration is an approach that collects software and domain information from a large group of users that lies somewhere between questionnaires and face to face methods

PLEC, A Participative Processfor GUI Prototyping

GUI is one of the key aspect of an information system from the pointof view of customers and users. This paper introduces PLEC, a par-ticipative process for designing GUI interfaces with the collaborationof the final users and stakeholders. Participants do not need technicalknowledge of GUI prototype. A case study has been developed andcarried out to verify if PLEC process is feasible.2019-2

Requerimientos de Software: Prototipado, software heredado y análisis de documentos

This paper presents a literature review about alternatives for determination of requirements in software development projects. The literature searching begins from a fundamental principle, request information about methods of determination of requirements that do not need a high percentage of interaction with users or customers. This usually happens because users or customers don’t have time as it happens when traditional methods are used. The search for information was made taking into account the low interaction with the user or customer and in this vein, it was needed to expand the search horizon until 2000 and it includes classic texts in the study area. The search results provided insights about the techniques of requirements engineering, whose main characteristic is to minimize the interaction with users, such as, prototyping, document analysis and legacy software which are the closest ones to the search condition.Este artículo presenta un rastreo bibliográfico sobre alternativas poco usuales para el levantamiento de requisitos en proyectos de desarrollo de software. La búsqueda bibliográfica parte de un principio fundamental, recabar información sobre métodos de levantamiento de requisitos que no requieran de un alto porcentaje de interacción con los usuarios o clientes. Esta situación obedece a que usualmente los usuarios o clientes no disponen del tiempo requerido como ocurre cuando se usan métodos tradicionales. La búsqueda de información se realizó teniendo como clave principal la baja interacción con el usuario o cliente y en este orden de ideas, hubo necesidad de ampliar el horizonte temporal de búsqueda hasta el año 2000 e incluir textos clásicos en el área de estudio. Los resultados de la búsqueda arrojaron luces sobre las técnicas de la Ingeniería de Requisitos, cuya característica principal es la minimizar la interacción con los usuarios, siendo, el prototipado, el análisis de documentos y el software heredado las que más se aproximan a la condición de búsqueda

An analysis of verbs within video game structures based on a video game verb theory and The Secret of Monkey Island

The aims of this thesis are as followes: to provide a review of the idea presented by three game designers – Chris Crawford, Raph Koster and Anna Anthropy – according to which, verbs should be used to describe the interactions and inner rule structures of video games; present these ideas as a unified theory of verbs within game structures; provide a method for analysing these verbs through syntactic theory presented by Bas Aarts and Van Valin and LaPolla; apply the combined theory of verbs in game structures and the methodology and concepts from syntax to analyse the verbs in the structure of the 1990 point and click adventure game The Secret of Monkey Island and its 2009 Enhanced edition.http://www.ester.ee/record=b4678178*es

Hybrid toy construction

Este proyecto, 'Hybrid Toy Construction', se enfoca en enriquecer la experiencia de juego de los niños a través de los juguetes. Al comparar las diferentes experiencias de juego de los niños con una interfaz de usuario tangible (TUI), una interfaz de usuario física (PUI) y una interfaz de usuario gráfica (GUI), se comprobó que los niños prefieren usar un juguete con una GUI sobre una TUI o una PUI. El objetivo del proyecto es la creación de un juguete híbrido para niños de cinco a seis años. Para ello, el juguete contiene elementos físicos (PUI) en forma de un tren, pistas, estaciones y otros objetos inteligentes, así como elementos digitales (GUI) en forma de aplicación. Ambas realidades (la física y la digital) se comunican mediante Bluetooth, estando relacionadas a través de una aplicación para enriquecer la experiencia del usuario. El juguete tiene el propósito de estimular los sentidos de los niños y fomentar su desarrollo mediante el uso de la diversión y juegos educacionalesDepartamento de Teoría de la Arquitectura y Proyectos ArquitectónicosGrado en Ingeniería en Diseño Industrial y Desarrollo de Product

Communicating distrust: three cases

Over the past 25 years, the field of technical communication has been witness to an influx of information technologies that have drastically changed the work and roles of academic and non-academic practitioners and researchers, pushing questions about authorship and legitimacy of information construction into focus. Factors affecting technical communicators\u27 work roles include transitions from an industrial economy to a support economy (Zuboff & Maxim, 2004), changes in management philosophies (Dicks, 2010), and changes in methodologies for content delivery (Carliner, 2010). As a result, the inherent reuse, reconstruction, and recontextualizing of texts in these new environments has raised questions within technical communication scholarship about how writers and designers construct trustworthy ethos, manage audience expectations, and mitigate doubts about the legitimacy of communication (Slattery, 2007; Swarts, 2007, 2010). This dissertation presents three separate papers considering the ways in which distrust manifests in communication through diagnostic procedures, new media tool usage, and professional identity construction. The articles in this collection dive into three distinct discursive worlds, all with their own conventions, affordances, and dangers. The similarities between brain injury diagnostics, web developer toolsets, and user experience hiring practices, are certainly few. However, each case shares an attention to how the invisibility of some types of knowledge create a context within which tools, products, or people can lose an audience\u27s trust or identification

Automatic Transformation-Based Model Checking of Multi-agent Systems

Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) are highly useful constructs in the context of real-world software applications. Built upon communication and interaction between autonomous agents, these systems are suitable to model and implement intelligent applications. Yet these desirable features are precisely what makes these systems very challenging to design, and their compliance with requirements extremely difficult to verify. This explains the need for the development of techniques and tools to model, understand, and implement interacting MASs. Among the different methods developed, the design-time verification techniques for MASs based on model checking offer the advantage of being formal and fully automated. We can distinguish between two different approaches used in model checking MASs, the direct verification approach, and the transformation-based approach. This thesis focuses on the later that relies on formal reduction techniques to transform the problem of model checking a source logic into that of an equivalent problem of model checking a target logic. In this thesis, we propose a new transformation framework leveraging the model checking of the computation tree logic (CTL) and its NuSMV model checker to design and implement the process of transformation-based model checking for CTL-extension logics to MASs. The approach provides an integrated system with a rich set of features, designed to support the transformation process while simplifying the most challenging and error-prone tasks. The thesis presents and describes the tool built upon this framework and its different applications. A performance comparison with MCMAS, the model checker of MASs, is also discussed

Students´ language in computer-assisted tutoring of mathematical proofs

Truth and proof are central to mathematics. Proving (or disproving) seemingly simple statements often turns out to be one of the hardest mathematical tasks. Yet, doing proofs is rarely taught in the classroom. Studies on cognitive difficulties in learning to do proofs have shown that pupils and students not only often do not understand or cannot apply basic formal reasoning techniques and do not know how to use formal mathematical language, but, at a far more fundamental level, they also do not understand what it means to prove a statement or even do not see the purpose of proof at all. Since insight into the importance of proof and doing proofs as such cannot be learnt other than by practice, learning support through individualised tutoring is in demand. This volume presents a part of an interdisciplinary project, set at the intersection of pedagogical science, artificial intelligence, and (computational) linguistics, which investigated issues involved in provisioning computer-based tutoring of mathematical proofs through dialogue in natural language. The ultimate goal in this context, addressing the above-mentioned need for learning support, is to build intelligent automated tutoring systems for mathematical proofs. The research presented here has been focused on the language that students use while interacting with such a system: its linguistic propeties and computational modelling. Contribution is made at three levels: first, an analysis of language phenomena found in students´ input to a (simulated) proof tutoring system is conducted and the variety of students´ verbalisations is quantitatively assessed, second, a general computational processing strategy for informal mathematical language and methods of modelling prominent language phenomena are proposed, and third, the prospects for natural language as an input modality for proof tutoring systems is evaluated based on collected corpora

Proceedings of the 3rd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects

These are the Proceedings of the 3rd IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects. Objects that we use in our everyday life are expanding their restricted interaction capabilities and provide functionalities that go far beyond their original functionality. They feature computing capabilities and are thus able to capture information, process and store it and interact with their environments, turning them into smart objects