Model-based customizable adaptation of web applications for vocal browsing

In this paper we describe a solution to make Web pages more suitable for vocal browsing by analyzing and modifying their logical structure. The solution exploits intermediate logical descriptions that are automatically created by reverse engineering techniques. The adaptation engine aims to identify the main logical structure of the Web page components and remove the aspects specific to the graphical modality. Then, a vocal implementation is generated to support browsing, which begins by the user’s selecting from the main components. It is possible to customize some parameters of the adaptation transformation in order to better control its results

Desktop-to-Mobile Web Adaptation through Customizable Two-Dimensional Semantic Redesign

International audienceIn this paper we present a novel method for desktop-to-mobile adaptation. The solution also supports end-users in customizing multi-device ubiquitous user interfaces. In particular, we describe an algorithm and the corresponding tool support to perform desktop-to-mobile adaptation by exploiting logical user interface descriptions able to capture interaction semantic information indicating the purpose of the interface elements. We also compare our solution with existing tools for similar goals

Revealing the Vicious Circle of Disengaged User Acceptance: A SaaS Provider's Perspective

User acceptance tests (UAT) are an integral part of many different software engineering methodologies. In this paper, we examine the influence of UATs on the relationship between users and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, which are continuously delivered rather than rolled out during a one-off signoff process. Based on an exploratory qualitative field study at a multinational SaaS provider in Denmark, we show that UATs often address the wrong problem in that positive user acceptance may actually indicate a negative user experience. Hence, SaaS providers should be careful not to rest on what we term disengaged user acceptance. Instead, we outline an approach that purposefully queries users for ambivalent emotions that evoke constructive criticism, in order to facilitate a discourse that favors the continuous innovation of a SaaS system. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our approach for the study of user engagement in testing SaaS applications

The Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility as a best-practice model for biodiversity data infrastructures

Biodiversity informatics has advanced rapidly with the maturation of major biodiversity data infrastructures (BDDIs), such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility sharing unprecedented data volumes. Nevertheless, taxonomic, temporal and spatial data coverage remains unsatisfactory. With an increasing data need, the global BDDIs require continuous inflow from local data mobilisation, and national BDDIs are being developed around the world. The global BDDIs are specialised in certain data types or data life cycle stages which, despite possible merits, renders the BDDI landscape fragmented and complex. That this often is repeated at the national level creates counterproductive redundancy, complicates user services, and frustrates funders. Here, we present the Finnish Biodiversity Information Facility (FinBIF) as a model of an all-inclusive BDDI. It integrates relevant data types and phases of the data life cycle, manages them under one IT architecture, and distributes the data through one service portal under one brand. FinBIF has experienced diverse funder engagement and rapid user uptake. Therefore, we suggest the integrated and inclusive approach be adopted in national BDDI development.peerReviewe

Bulgarian National Ethnographic Museum – Meeting the Challenges of Digitisation

The conservation, spread, comprehension and recreation of traditional culture heritages is one of the main purpose of the National Ethnographic Museum in Bulgaria. As other cultural and scientific heritage institutions, it begins to use new information technologies and strategies for providing access to its cultural heritage treasures. This paper aims to present digital libraries with multimedia content as a modern technological solution for innovative presentation of Bulgarian ethnographical heritage. It includes some basic concepts of digital libraries with multimedia content and a description of three types of architecture. The paper also describes the ideas, conceptual decisions and strategies in the project Experimental Digital Library “Bulgarian Ethnographic Treasury”

USER INTERFACES FOR MOBILE DEVICES: TECHNIQUES AND CASE STUDIES

The interactive capabilities of portable devices that are nowadays increasingly available, enable mobile computing in diverse contexts. However, in order to fully exploit the potentialities of such technologies and to let end users benefit from them, effective and usable techniques are still needed. In general, differences in capabilities, such as computational power and interaction resources, lead to an heterogeneity that is sometimes positively referred to as device diversity but also, negatively, as device fragmentation. When designing applications for mobile devices, besides general rules and principles of usability, developers cope with further constraints. Restricted capabilities, due to display size, input modality and computational power, imply important design and implementation choices in order to guarantee usability. In addition, when the application is likely to be used by subjects affected by some impairment, the system has also to comply with accessibility requirements. The aim of this dissertation is to propose and discuss examples of such techniques, aimed to support user interfaces on mobile devices, by tackling design, development and evaluation of specific solutions for portable terminals as well as for enabling interoperability across diverse devices (including desktops, handhelds, smartphones). Usefulness and usability aspects are taken into great consideration by the main research questions that drove the activities of the study. With respect the such questions, the three central chapters of the dissertation are respectively aimed at evaluating: hardware/software solutions for edutainment and accessibility in mobile museum guides, visualization strategies for mobile users visiting smart environments, and techniques for user interface migration across diverse devices in multi-user contexts. Motivations, design, implementation and evaluation about a number of solutions aimed to support several dimensions of user interfaces for mobile devices are widely discussed throughout the dissertation, and some findings are drawn. Each one of the prototypes described in the following chapters has been entirely developed within the research activities of the laboratory where the author performed his PhD. Most activities were related to tasks of international research projects and the organization of this dissertation reflects their evolution chronology

Social and Semantic Contexts in Tourist Mobile Applications

The ongoing growth of the World Wide Web along with the increase possibility of access information through a variety of devices in mobility, has defi nitely changed the way users acquire, create, and personalize information, pushing innovative strategies for annotating and organizing it. In this scenario, Social Annotation Systems have quickly gained a huge popularity, introducing millions of metadata on di fferent Web resources following a bottom-up approach, generating free and democratic mechanisms of classi cation, namely folksonomies. Moving away from hierarchical classi cation schemas, folksonomies represent also a meaningful mean for identifying similarities among users, resources and tags. At any rate, they suff er from several limitations, such as the lack of specialized tools devoted to manage, modify, customize and visualize them as well as the lack of an explicit semantic, making di fficult for users to bene fit from them eff ectively. Despite appealing promises of Semantic Web technologies, which were intended to explicitly formalize the knowledge within a particular domain in a top-down manner, in order to perform intelligent integration and reasoning on it, they are still far from reach their objectives, due to di fficulties in knowledge acquisition and annotation bottleneck. The main contribution of this dissertation consists in modeling a novel conceptual framework that exploits both social and semantic contextual dimensions, focusing on the domain of tourism and cultural heritage. The primary aim of our assessment is to evaluate the overall user satisfaction and the perceived quality in use thanks to two concrete case studies. Firstly, we concentrate our attention on contextual information and navigation, and on authoring tool; secondly, we provide a semantic mapping of tags of the system folksonomy, contrasted and compared to the expert users' classi cation, allowing a bridge between social and semantic knowledge according to its constantly mutual growth. The performed user evaluations analyses results are promising, reporting a high level of agreement on the perceived quality in use of both the applications and of the speci c analyzed features, demonstrating that a social-semantic contextual model improves the general users' satisfactio

Interfaces proactivas móviles desde Legacies Web: Un enfoque de diseño conductual

Contexto: Los sistemas heredados o legacies son sistemas independientes construidos en una era tecnológica anterior que disponen de precaria documentación que se resisten significativamente a su modificación y evolución, para cubrir cambios en sus requerimientos, además son grandes sistemas parcialmente desconocidos y vitales para las organizaciones y que en su mayoría no poseen financiamiento para mejoras. En contraposición a los legacies, las aplicaciones móviles cambiaron inesperadamente la vida de las personas dado que las aplicaciones son una herramienta omnipresente en la vida cotidiana y clave fundamental en los modelos de negocio en todo el mundo. Los problemas de usabilidad de aplicaciones heredadas se han estudiado en diferentes trabajos, debido a que desde este auge estos inconvenientes se han hecho evidentes cada día, algunos de los más relevantes radican en la legibilidad de la tipografía, los iconos, el tamaño, la orientación de la pantalla, la pérdida de tiempo y la excesiva carga cognitiva para los usuarios debido al tamaño de la pantalla, entre otras limitaciones de los dispositivos. Objetivo: En esta tesis se propone un enfoque empático multidisciplinario que permite la correcta portabilización de legacies web a móviles a través de algoritmos predictivos como las cadenas de Markov que ofrecen una mejorada experiencia de usuario a través de la obtención del modelo de comportamiento de navegación avalada por métricas de usabilidad, de manera adicional se logra la mejora de la productividad laboral y el cumplimiento de las heurísticas de Nielsen. Método: Este estudio se basó en el método de ingeniería del paradigma evolutivo el cual se trata de observar las soluciones existentes, etapa realizada a través de un mapeo y revisión sistemática de la literatura de la última década, luego se debe proponer mejores soluciones, crear o desarrollar, medir y analizar y repetir hasta que no haya más mejoras posibles, etapa en la cual se propone el enfoque empático basado en el modelo Markoviano para obtener el modelo de navegación del usuario, entregado a través del mínimo producto viable en varias iteraciones hasta lograr perfeccionar el modelo. Por lo tanto, llegar a una mejor propuesta final depende en gran medida de la creatividad y el sentido común aplicado a la construcción del nuevo método. Esta vista orientada a la mejora evolutiva supone que el investigador ya tiene modelos del proceso de software, producto, personas, del entorno y modifica el modelo o los aspectos del modelo para mejorar lo que se está estudiando. Resultados: En el mapeo sistemático se obtienen 44 artículos que presentan diferentes enfoques que solucionan de manera básica, parcial o especifica la portabilización, se evidencia que no existen enfoques de diseño centrados en el usuario, tampoco basados en modelos de Markov y que las propuestas no son evaluadas con métricas como la de la productividad laboral, heurísticas de Nielsen ni las de la ISO 9241-11, así como la Leyes de Fitts y Hick. Al proponer y posteriormente implementar este enfoque empático a través de una herramienta se logra demostrar que la productividad laboral mejora en un rango de 75% a 530% con respecto a la aplicación original, por otro lado, los tiempos de consecución de las tareas se reducen en una proporción de 3 a 1 para los casos analizados. Los deslizamientos en pantalla se reducen en promedio a la mitad. Además, la satisfacción del usuario a través de una encuesta muestra un aumento en la calificación de parámetros de estética y diseño, la facilidad de uso, los contenidos e información, y la utilidad para el 100% de los usuarios. Cabe destacar que a partir de este estudio se han logrado cinco publicaciones SCOPUS. Conclusiones: La contribución incluye un trabajo transdisciplinario que demuestra que este modelo hace posible un diseño de interfaz inteligente y proactivo, considerando además variables sociodemográficas directamente relacionadas que contribuyen a la economía del contexto. Este estudio apoya la idea de que incluir cadenas de Markov para predecir el comportamiento del usuario podría ser una de las teorías conductuales que se pueden aplicar para mejorar otros enfoques, como los sistemas basados en modelos, en términos de asignación automática de pesos y prioridades. Por otro lado la tecnología al fin de cuentas debe apoyar la producción de valor en el negocio, por lo que los enfoques para el desarrollo y diseño de sistemas deben considerar metodologías interdisciplinarias, transversales que incluyan profesionales o teorías establecidas por otras áreas como la sociología, economía, matemática que permitan humanizar el software con la capacitad de predecir las conductas para que el producto llegue a ser lo que el cliente quiere, inclusive alcanzar una investigación aplicada al ciudadano. A través de este tipo de enfoques, las empresas pueden llegar a ser más independientes de las redes sociales enriqueciendo la base de clientes, generando su propio big data, CRMs, business intelligence y finalmente inbound marketing que permita ser una organización orientada por los datos generando la hiperpersonalización. Por tanto, los perfiles de usuario juegan un papel importante ya que ayudan a definir diferentes niveles de personalización para aumentar el valor de vida útil del cliente (CLV) y también el retorno sobre inversión (ROI) en la transformación digital. Como trabajo futuro, se planea la mejora continua del enfoque e integrar en primera instancia todas las personalizaciones en un solo sitio web para que el usuario con un único inicio de sesión pueda acceder a todas sus personalizaciones y comportamientos de navegación para que no deba instalar el script de un dispositivo a otro.Context: Inherited systems or legacies are independent systems built in a previous technological era that have precarious documentation that significantly resist to its modification and evolution, to cover changes in its requirements, furthermore, are large systems that are partially unknown and vital for organizations and most of them do not have financing for improvements. In contrast to legacies, mobile applications have unexpectedly changed people’s lives due to applications are an omnipresent tool in daily life and a fundamental key in business models around the world. The usability problems of legacy inherited applications have been studied in different works, because since this boom these drawbacks have become evident every day, some of the most relevant lie in the legibility of typography, icons, size, orientation of the screen, the waste of time and the excessive cognitive load for the users due to the size of the screen among other limitations of the devices. Objective: In this thesis, a multidisciplinary empathic approach is proposed that allows the correct portability of web legacies to mobiles through predictive algorithms such as Markov chains that offer an improved user experience through obtaining the guaranteed navigation behavior model by usability metrics, additionally the improvement of labor productivity and compliance of Nielsen heuristics is achieved. Method: This study was based on the evolutionary paradigm engineering method which tries to observe the existing solutions, a stage carried out through a mapping and systematic review of the literature of the last decade, then better solutions must be proposed, created or developed, to measure and analyze and repeat until no more improvements are possible, stage in which the empathic approach based on the Markovian model is proposed to obtain the user navigation model, delivered through the minimum viable product in several interactions until the model becomes perfected. Therefore, reaching a better final proposal depends largely on creativity and common sense applied to the construction of the new method. This evolutionary improvement oriented view assumes that the researcher already has models of the software process, product, people, and environment as well as modifies the model or aspect of the model to improve what is being studied. Results: In the systematic mapping, 44 articles are obtained that present different approaches that solve portability in a basic, partial or specific way, it is evident that there are no user- centered design approaches, nor are based on Markov models and that the proposals are not evaluated with metrics as the labor productivity, Nielsen heuristics nor the ISO 9241-11, as well as the Laws of Fitts and Hicks. By proposing and subsequently implementing this empathetic approach through a tool, it is possible to demonstrate that labor productivity improves in a range of 75% to 530% with respect to the original application, on the other hand, the times for completing tasks are reduced in a proportion of 3 to 1. Screen swipes are reduced by half on average. In addition, user satisfaction through a survey shows an increase in the rating of aesthetic and design parameters, ease of use, content and information, and usefulness for 100% of users. Noteworthy, that from this study five SCOPUS publications have been achieved. Conclusions: The contribution includes a transdisciplinary work that demonstrated that this model makes possible an intelligent and proactive interface design, also considering directly related sociodemographic variables that contribute to the economy of the context. This study supports the idea that including Markov chains to predict user behavior could be one of the behavioral theories that can be applied to improve other approaches, such as models based on systems, in terms of automatic assignment of weights and priorities. On the other hand, technology, in the end, must support the production of value in business, so the approaches for the development and design of systems must consider interdisciplinary, transversal methodologies that include professionals or theories established by other areas such as sociology, economics, mathematics that allow humanizing the software with the ability to predict behaviors so that the product becomes what the client wants, including achieving applied research for the citizen. Through this type of approach, companies can become more independent of social networks, enriching the customer base, generating their own big data, CRMs, business intelligence and finally inbound marketing that allows them to be an organization guided through the data generating hyperpersonalization. Therefore, user profiles play a significant role as they help define distinct levels of personalization to increase customer lifetime value (CLV) and return on investment (ROI) in digital transformation. As future work, it is planned to continuously improve the approach and integrate in the first instance all the customizations in a single website so that the user with a single login can access all their customizations and browsing behaviors, so the user should not have to install the script from one device to another.Facultad de Informátic