70,848 research outputs found
ACQUIRING APPLICATION-SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE DURING DESIGN TO SUPPORT SYSTEMS MAINTENANCE
Most large systems development efforts proceed in a top-down fashion where initial
specifications and requirements are incorporated into a high-level design, followed by
programs based on this design. However, a major part of the software life-cycle effort is
devoted to maintenance. While several existing methodologies aid in the initial phases of
requirements and specification, they have proven to be of little value for maintenance.
Changes in user requirements are often translated directly to the level of code, divorcing
it from the high level design it was based on. After a few such changes, the programs
may not correspond to any formal high-level design, making subsequent maintenance
difficult. We argue that maintenance must be based on the knowledge used in
synthesizing the high-level design. This requires a development environment where the
knowledge about high-level designs is formally represented, and raises the question
about how this knowledge will be acquired by the support environment in the first
place. In this paper, we present a model that enables the support environment to acquire
design knowledge through "learning by observation" of a designer engaged in specifying
a high-level design. The knowledge that the learning system begins with is a generic
object for expressing design decisions. Based on the input provided by the designer, and
a limited interactive querying process, it constructs and continuously refines a
taxonomic classification of application-specific knowledge and rules at an appropriate
level of generality that capture the rationale of the design. This knowledge can be used
subsequently for maintaining system designs and recognizing design situations similar to
the ones it has knowledge about.Information Systems Working Papers Serie
Modelling the relationship between planning, control, perception and execution behaviours in interactive worksystems
This paper presents a model of planning carried out by interactive worksystems which attempts: 1. To describe the relationship between planning, control, perception and execution behaviours; 2. To make explicit how these may be distributed across the user and physically separate devices. Such a model, it is argued, is more suitable to support HCI design practice than theories of planning in cognitive science which focus on problem-solving methods and representations. To demonstrate the application of the model to work situations, it is illustrated by examples drawn from an observational study of secretarial office administration
Subjective information visualizations
Information Visualizations (InfoViz) are systems that require high levels of cognitive processing. They
revolve around the notion of decoding and interpreting visual patterns in order to achieve certain
goals. We argue that purely designing for the visual will not allow for optimum experiences since there
is more to InfoViz than just the visual. Interaction is a key to achieving higher levels of knowledge. In
this position paper we present a different perspective on the underlying meaning of interaction, where
we describe it as incorporating both the visual and the physical activities. By physical activities we
mean the physical actions upon the physical input device/s. We argue that interaction is the key
element for supporting usersā subjective experiences hence these experiences should first be
understood. All the discussions in this paper are based upon on going work in the field of visualizing
the literature knowledge domain (LKDViz)
Reasoning about order errors in interaction
Reliability of an interactive system depends on users as well as the device implementation. User errors can result in catastrophic system
failure. However, work from the field of cognitive science shows that
systems can be designed so as to completely eliminate whole classes of
user errors. This means that user errors should also fall within the remit
of verification methods. In this paper we demonstrate how the HOL
theorem prover [7] can be used to detect and prove the absence of the
family of errors known as order errors. This is done by taking account
of the goals and knowledge of users. We provide an explicit generic user
model which embodies theory from the cognitive sciences about the way
people are known to act. The user model describes action based on user
communication goals. These are goals that a user adopts based on their
knowledge of the task they must perform to achieve their goals. We use
a simple example of a vending machine to demonstrate the approach.
We prove that a user does achieve their goal for a particular design of
machine. In doing so we demonstrate that communication goal based
errors cannot occur
Verification-guided modelling of salience and cognitive load
Well-designed interfaces use procedural and sensory cues to increase the cognitive salience of appropriate actions. However, empirical studies suggest that cognitive load can influence the strength of those cues. We formalise the relationship between salience and cognitive load revealed by empirical data. We add these rules to our abstract cognitive architecture, based on higher-order logic and developed for the formal verification of usability properties. The interface of a fire engine dispatch task from the empirical studies is then formally modelled and verified. The outcomes of this verification and their comparison with the empirical data provide a way of assessing our salience and load rules. They also guide further iterative refinements of these rules. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the outcomes of formal analysis and empirical studies suggests new experimental hypotheses, thus providing input to researchers in cognitive science
A software toolkit for web-based virtual environments based on a shared database
We propose a software toolkit for developing complex web-based user interfaces, incorporating such things as multi-user facilities, virtual environments (VEs), and interface agents. The toolkit is based on a novel software architecture that combines ideas from multi-agent platforms and user interface (UI) architectures. It provides a distributed shared database with publish-subscribe facilities. This enables UI components to observe the state and activities of any other components in the system easily. The system runs in a web-based environment. The toolkit is comprised of several programming and other specification languages, providing a complete suite of systems design languages. We illustrate the toolkit by means of a couple of examples
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