Prototyping Corporate User Interfaces – Towards A Visual Specification Of Interactive Systems

Corporate software development faces very demanding challenges, especially concerning the user interface of a software system. Collaborative design with stakeholders demands informal modeling methods that everybody can understand and apply. But using traditional, paper-based methods to gather and document requirements, an IT organization often experiences frustrating communication issues between the business and development teams. We present ways of agile high-fidelity prototyping for corporate user interface design. Without harming agile principles and practice, detailed prototypes can be employed for collaborative design, can act as visual specifications and substitute paper-based artifacts

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

A Review of Milestones in the History of GUI Prototyping Tools

International audiencePrototyping is one of the core activities of User-Centered Design (UCD) processes and an integral component of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Nonetheless, for many years, prototyping was synonym of paper-based mock-ups and only more recently we can say that dedicated tools for supporting prototyping activities really reach the market. In this paper we propose to analyze the evolution of prototyping tools proposed by the academic community to support research activities and prototyping tools that are aimed and improve the development process of commercial user interfaces. Thus, this paper presents a review of past and current graphical user interface prototyping tools, in order to set up the state of the art in this field, observing fundamental milestones of features over time. For that, we have screened publications presented since 1988 in some of the main HCI conferences and 113 commercial tools available on the web. The results enable a brief comparison of characteristics present in both academic and commercial tools, how they have evolved and what are the gaps that can provide insights for future research and development

Prototypointimenetelmien käyttö käyttäjäkeskeisessä suunnitteluprosessissa

To stay competitive in the rapidly evolving business environment, organizations need to be able to create innovations. Novel new products are often created with experimentation, which means that organizations need to use practices that support experimentation. Prototyping is one such practice. Agile software development embraces changing requirements, which makes it suitable for experimentation-driven product development. The overall research problem considers how different types of prototyping approaches can support fast-paced product development in an agile software development project. Research questions include: 1. How to improve prototyping for fast-paced agile software development? 2. How can prototyping support agile requirements engineering? The research consists of two main parts: literature review and empirical research, which includes action research and interviews. Prototyping could be improved for the purposes of fast-paced agile software projects by using simplified prototypes and small focused prototypes to make it possible to iterate the design of user interface elements faster. Additionally, low-fidelity prototyping and participatory design could be useful for agile projects. To make large high-fidelity prototypes faster to iterate, better tooling is needed. Prototyping can support agile requirements engineering e.g. by acting as documentation, facilitating communication and by making big picture clearer.Pysyäkseen kilpailukykyisinä nopeasti kehittyvässä liiketoimintaympäristössä organisaatioiden pitää kyetä luomaan innovaatioita. Uudenlaiset tuotteet saadaan usein aikaiseksi kokeilujen avulla, mistä johtuen on käytettävä käytäntöjä, jotka tukevat kokeilujen tekemistä. Prototypointi on yksi tällainen käytäntö. Ketterä ohjelmistokehitys ottaa halukkaasti vastaan muuttuvat vaatimusmääritykset, joten se soveltuu kokeiluita hyödyntävään tuotteiden kehitykseen. Tutkimusongelma tarkastelee, kuinka erilaiset prototypointitavat tukevat nopeatempoista tuotekehitystä ketterässä ohjelmistokehitysprojektissa. Tutkimuskysymykset ovat: 1. Kuinka prototypointia voidaan kehittää nopeatempoista ketterää ohjelmistokehitystä varten? 2. Kuinka prototypointi tukee ketterää vaatimusmäärittelyä? Tutkimus sisältää kaksi pääosaa: kirjallisuuskatsauksen ja kokeellisen osan, joka koostuu haastatteluista ja toimintatutkimuksesta. Prototypointia voidaan kehittää nopeatempoisten ketterien ohjelmistoprojektien tarpeisiin käyttämällä yksinkertaistettuja prototyyppejä sekä pienempiä ja fokusoituneempia prototyyppejä käyttöliittymäelementtien designin iteroinnin nopeuttamiseksi. Matalan tarkkuuden prototyypit ja osallistava suunnittelu voivat myös olla avuksi ketterissä projekteissa. Isojen korkean tarkkuuden prototyyppien iteroinnin nopeuttaminen vaatii uusien työkalujen kehittämistä. Prototypointi voi tukea ketterää vaatimusmäärittelyä esim. toimimalla dokumentaationa, helpottamalla kommunikaatiota ja tekemällä ns. ison kuvan selvemmäksi

How Do UX Practitioners Communicate AI as a Design Material? Artifacts, Conceptions, and Propositions

UX practitioners (UXPs) face novel challenges when working with and communicating artificial intelligence (AI) as a design material. We explore how UXPs communicate AI concepts when given hands-on experience training and experimenting with AI models. To do so, we conducted a task-based design study with 27 UXPs in which they prototyped and created a design presentation for a AI-enabled interface while having access to a simple AI model training tool. Through analyzing UXPs' design presentations and post-activity interviews, we found that although UXPs struggled to clearly communicate some AI concepts, tinkering with AI broadened common ground when communicating with technical stakeholders. UXPs also identified key risks and benefits of AI in their designs, and proposed concrete next steps for both UX and AI work. We conclude with a sensitizing concept and recommendations for design and AI tools to enhance multi-stakeholder communication and collaboration when crafting human-centered AI experiences

User-driven design of decision support systems for polycentric environmental resources management

Open and decentralized technologies such as the Internet provide increasing opportunities to create knowledge and deliver computer-based decision support for multiple types of users across scales. However, environmental decision support systems/tools (henceforth EDSS) are often strongly science-driven and assuming single types of decision makers, and hence poorly suited for more decentralized and polycentric decision making contexts. In such contexts, EDSS need to be tailored to meet diverse user requirements to ensure that it provides useful (relevant), usable (intuitive), and exchangeable (institutionally unobstructed) information for decision support for different types of actors. To address these issues, we present a participatory framework for designing EDSS that emphasizes a more complete understanding of the decision making structures and iterative design of the user interface. We illustrate the application of the framework through a case study within the context of water-stressed upstream/downstream communities in Lima, Peru

Designing a Multimodal Graph System to Support Non-Visual Interpretation of Graphical Information

While researchers have performed numerous studies to understand the human interpretation of visual graphs in reading, comprehending and interpreting displayed data; visually impaired (VI) users still face many challenges that prevent them from fully benefiting from these graphs. Thus, it influences their understanding of data visualization and in turn reduces their role in collaborating with their sighted colleagues in educational and working environments. We intend to develop a mobile application where visually impaired users can work together to build a collaborative graph that supported by data sonification in the mobile environment. The system properties were all tested by the task of identifying line trends in time series, which resulted in an accuracy of more than 80% for notes below 20 points. The usability testing has given result of 6.7 out 10 based on users' perception on the effectivity of the features

A High Fidelity Interface for Documents Merging Tool Using a Language Analysis Oracle

Revision is an important step in the writing process in order to obtain a good written work. It is mostly needed in academia, industry, and government. Usually, it is done by one reviser or more who is not the author of the written piece. The role of revisers is not limited to correcting any spelling or grammar mistakes, but also ensuring the coherence of the writing as well as the words used by the author to express his/her idea correctly to the readers. In addition, revisers help the author to put his/her writing in the appropriate format. One approach to do the revision is individually in a parallel way where each reviser modifies the original document. As a result, the author ends up with multiple versions of his/her work. For this situation, many merging control systems have been developed to enable the user to merge the revised versions with the original document in order to represent the changes that were made in the revised versions in an easily understandable way. Although these merging tools provide the users with much of the relevant information about the changes and who made them, the interfaces of these tools do not allow users to filter the corrections so that the users’ attention can be focused on the most important changes. For example, if there are format changes and grammar corrections, in addition to editing changes that could change the meaning of the author’s original writing, we believe that users would prefer to pay attention to the changes that could change the meaning and then check the format changes, after taking a look at grammar corrections. In this thesis we developed a new merging interface that enables the user to filter the changes, based on their level of importance, to give them special attention. In addition, the interface provides the users with a user-friendly control panel that allows the user to choose among conflicting changes. This will help users produce a correct merged document. A usability study was conducted with ten graduate students from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee to test whether a high fidelity prototype of this interface would help users to better understand the changes that were made in the two revisions as well as choose the best revisions. While the study found both positive and negative qualities in the prototype, most participants valued the change classification feature, suggesting that it is worthy of further research