Nova abordagem para a prestação de serviços de consultoria de tecnologias de informação na Novabase

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Industrial e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Human-Centered Software Engineering : Software Engineering Models, Patterns, and Architectures for HCI

The fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Software Engineering (SE) have evolved almost independently from each other until the last two decades, when it became obvious that an integrated perspective would benefit the development of interactive software applications as considered in both disciplines. The chapters in this book are written by prominent researchers and practitioners who bring to light the major issues and challenges posed by this integration, and offer a variety of solutions in order to address the integration of HCI and SE, including: • Extensions of software development methodologies to accommodate for the specific constraints of usage-centered design. • Introduction of innovative, structured, and model-driven user interface engineering approaches. • Addressing software architecture issues in the design of user interfaces. • Reingineering of existing systems for better usability

Understanding the customer experience for service design

Tese de mestrado. Engenharia de Serviços e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

Understanding the customer experience for service design

Tese de mestrado. Engenharia de Serviços e Gestão. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 201

A situation awareness interface for a bi-wheeled industrial hovercraft: design, development and evaluation

The intention of this thesis is to develop a prototype interface that enables an operator to control a bi-wheeled industrial hovercraft that will work within a fusion power plant if the automation system fails. This fusion power plant is part of the ITER project a conjoint effort of various industrialized countries to develop cleaner sources of energy. The development of the interface prototype will be based on situation awareness concepts, which provide a means to understand how human operators perceive the world around, then process that information and make decisions based on the knowledge that they already have and the projected knowledge of the reactions that will occur in the world in response to the actions the operator makes. Two major situation awareness methods will be used, GDTA as a means to discover the requirements the interface needs to solve, and SAGAT to conduct the evaluation on the three interfaces. This technique can isolate the differences an operator has in situation awareness when presented with relevant information given by each of the three interfaces that were built for this thesis. Where the first interface presents the information within the operator’s focal point of view in a pictorial style, the second interface shows the same information within the same point of view has the first interface but only shows it in a textual manner. While the third interface shows the relevant information in the operator’s peripheral field of view. Also SAGAT can provide insight on the question to know if providing the operator with feed-forward information about the stoppage distances of the bi-wheeled industrial hovercraft has any effect on the operator’s decision making.Universidade da Madeir

Une approche à base de modèles synergiques pour la prise en compte simultanée de l'utilisabilité, la fiabilité et l'opérabilité des systèmes interactifs critiques

Dans le cadre de la conception et du développement de systèmes interactifs critiques, lorsque le coût d'une erreur potentielle d'utilisation ou d'un dysfonctionnement du système peut dépasser le coût de développement de ce système ou se chiffrer en pertes humaines, les techniques, méthodes et processus actuellement proposés dans le domaine de l'IHM sont difficilement exploitables. D'une part, ils ne permettent pas de garantir simultanément les propriétés d'utilisabilité et de sûreté du système développé. D'autre part, la formation et la qualification des utilisateurs du système avant sa mise en opération n'est pas envisagée. Enfin, ces techniques, méthodes et processus ne fournissent pas les moyens de traçabilité exigés pour le développement de systèmes critiques. L'argumentaire de cette thèse s'appuie sur les avantages et limitations des approches existantes en termes de processus et notations de modélisation. Nous proposons une approche et montrons sa réalisation à travers un processus de développement d'un système interactif critique et de son programme de formation associé. Ce processus fournit un cadre conceptuel, une association d'étapes, des notations, et un environnement logiciel pour : le développement d'un système utilisable et sûr, le développement du programme de formation associé ainsi que la traçabilité des exigences et des choix de conception tout au long des différentes étapes. Il utilise certains principes de la conception centrée utilisateur et exploite de manière synergique les modèles des tâches, les modèles formels du comportement du système et le modèle de développement du programme de formation.In the field of interactive critical systems, the cost of a usage error or of a system failure can overcome the cost of the development of the system itself, and can result in loss of life, injury or damage to the system and its environment. Then, currently available Human Computer Interaction techniques, methods and processes are not sufficient, as they are not handling all of the design and development issues that are associated to interactive critical systems. First of all, these techniques, methods and processes do not enable to guarantee that the system will fulfil both usability and reliability properties. Then, they do not consider training and qualification of the users of the system. At last, they do not provide means for traceability of the needs and requirements through the whole development process. We propose an approach to develop interactive critical systems that are usable, reliable and operable and we describe the associated conceptual framework of our approach. We propose an implementation of this approach with a development process, notations and a software environment. The development process integrates phases for the development of the associated training program, and it provides support for the traceability of requirements and design choices during the whole phases of the process. This approach takes advantages from the User Centered Design paradigm and uses, in a synergistic way, task models, system's behaviour formal models and training program development model

Integração de usabilidade no paradigma de IoT em telesaúde: Automatização ao serviço da usabilidade

Durante os últimos anos os países desenvolvidos têm sofrido um shift demográfico fomentado pelo aumento da população idosa e pela redução da taxa de natalidade. A proeminência destes fatores nas sociedades atuais despoletou desafios de natureza societal, técnica e económica em várias áreas de atuação. Nessas áreas, destaca-se a área de saúde pela sua sensibilidade e relevância para o quotidiano de utilizadores com necessidades especiais (pessoas idosas, deficientes motores, entre outros). Nesse sentido, para mitigar os desafios impostos nos sistemas de saúde, têm-se adotado tecnologias de informação e comunicação para o dimensionamento de soluções dedicadas, que visam satisfazer necessidades específicas – os ecossistemas AAL (Ambiente de Vida Assistida). Apesar do seu atual estado de desenvolvimento, enfrentam múltiplos desafios relacionados com a autonomia, robustez, segurança, integração, interação humano-computador, armazenamento de dados e usabilidade, que condicionam a sua aceitação junto dos principais intervenientes [1][2][3][4]. O foco do desenvolvimento desta tipologia de ecossistemas sobre o paradigma tecnológico fomentou o desenvolvimento de aplicações específicas centralizadas sobre a mitigação de lacunas técnico-científicas [5][6][7][8], e é apontado como um dos motivos para os seus atuais níveis de adesão. A maximização da sua introdução no mercado impõe que o seu dimensionamento se centralize sobre o utilizador final, em termos de design, requisitos funcionais e não funcionais; e contemple o contexto de integração e continuidade de cuidados inseridos num sistema complexo, por contabilização da diversidade multidimensional dos utilizadores, da natureza das tarefas, do contexto de utilização e das plataformas tecnológicas [5]. Neste contexto, a usabilidade e a utilidade percecionada adquirem um papel de destaque, devido à sua estreita relação com o público-alvo. A necessidade crescente a nível empresarial de minimização do tempo necessário à colocação de produtos no mercado tem motivado a colocação da usabilidade do produto dimensionado em segundo plano [9][10][11]. Fator que aliado à morosidade do processo de análise e ao número de dependências, existência de profissionais na área, de utilizadores finais disponíveis para testar os protótipos dimensionados, entre outras, inviabiliza um estudo extensivo da usabilidade do produto antes, durante e após o seu desenvolvimento. No sentido de mitigar as lacunas identificadas no processo em termos de tempo de execução e dependências explícitas, visar-se-á dotar equipas de desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta que analise o produto dimensionado em tempo real ao nível das linhas orientadoras definidas na literatura. Para quantificar as linhas orientadoras especificadas, impor-se-á a sua parametrização baseada na informação existente na literatura. Nesse sentido, a tese visa compilar os parâmetros necessários a quantificar as linhas orientadoras definidas na literatura: Jakob Nielsen, Gerhardt‐Powals, Shneiderman, Weinschenk e Barker, e Tognazzini. Através da parametrização definir-se-á a base para traduzir linhas orientadoras em lógica a utilizar no dimensionamento de uma ferramenta de análise de usabilidade em tempo real das interfaces. Ferramenta que conferirá aos intervenientes diretos no ciclo de desenvolvimento, os programadores, uma forma objetiva de analisar a usabilidade do produto dimensionado sem requerer a intervenção de entidades externas a título inicial.In the past few years there has been a significant growth of the elderly population in both developing and developed countries. This event provided new economic, technical and demographic challenges to current societies in several areas and services. Among them the healthcare services can be highlighted, due to its impact in people daily lives. As a natural response an effort has been made by both the scientific and industrial community to develop alternatives, which could mitigate the current healthcare services bottlenecks and provide means in aiding and improve the end-user life quality. Through a combination of information and communication technologies specialized ecosystems have been developed, however multiple challenges arose, which compromise their adoption and acceptance among the main stakeholders, such as their autonomy, robustness, security, integration, human-computer interactions, and usability. As consequence an effort has been made to deal with the technical related bottlenecks, which shifted the development process focus from the end-user to the ecosystem’s technological impairments. Despite there being user related issues, such as usability, which remains to be addressed. Therefore, this thesis focuses over the ecosystem’s usability through the analysis of the process used to check the ecosystem’s compliance level with the usability guidelines subset from Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich, from Ben Shneiderman, from Weinschenk and Barker and from Tognazzini; and the identification of the quantifiable parameters for each principle that could aid in the heuristics evaluation process by maximizing its objectivity improve its overall accuracy. Through this quantification the base ground is set up to translate the broad guidelines defined in the literature to business rules that can be used to create a tool to check an interface usability overall status in real time. Tool which will provide the main entities in the development cycle an objective approach to check the usability of the product/service created without the intervention of real users in the initial stage of the project