Annual Report of the Municipal Officers of the Town of Lubec, Maine For the Year Ending March 1, 1913

\u3cp\u3eDesigners are frequently challenged by complex projects in which the problem space is unique, rapidly changing, and the information available is limited. In such cases, combining knowledge from different fields of expertise is required. Furthermore, collaboration during the design process is essential for achieving a meaningful and well-formed solution. Designers therefore regularly find themselves exchanging ideas and reflections in the form of emails, sketches, and images with a group of experts from different backgrounds, working altogether through the creation of a design, its development and proper implementation. This particular chapter focuses especially on issues of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, team dynamics and the management and monitoring of the early stages of the design process. The overall aim is to identify the essential characteristics and needs of distributed teams when in remote collaboration during the early stages of the design process and to suggest a prototype environment based on the identified requirements and workflow.\u3c/p\u3

Get your Requirements Straight: Storyboarding Revisited

Abstract. Current user-centred software engineering (UCSE) approaches provide many techniques to combine know-how available in multidisciplinary teams. Although the involvement of various disciplines is beneficial for the user experience of the future application, the transition from a user needs analysis to a structured interaction analysis and UI design is not always straightforward. We propose storyboards, enriched by metadata, to specify functional and nonfunctional requirements. Accompanying tool support should facilitate the creation and use of storyboards. We used a meta-storyboard for the verification of storyboarding approaches.

MuiCSer: A Process Framework for Multi-Disciplinary User-Centered Software Engineering processes

Abstract. In this paper we introduce MuiCSer, a conceptual process framework for Multi-disciplinary User-centred Software Engineering (UCSE) processes. UCSE processes strive for the combination of basic principles and practices from software engineering and user-centred design approaches in order to increase the overall user experience with the resulting product. The MuiCSer framework aims to provide a common understanding of important components and associated activities of UCSE processes. As such, the conceptual framework acts as a frame of reference for future research regarding various aspects and concepts related to this kind of processes, including models, development artefacts and tools. We present the MuiCSer process framework and illustrate its instantiation in customized processes for the (re)design of a system. The conceptual framework has been helpful to investigate the role of members of a multi-disciplinary team when realizing artefacts in a model-based approach. In particular process coverage of existing artefact transformation tools has been studied

Toward Multi-disciplinary Model-Based (Re)Design of Sustainable User Interfaces

Abstract. This paper reports on our experience in using the MuiCSer process framework for the redesign of the user interface for operating an industrial digital printing system. MuiCSer is created to support the user-centered interface design of new and legacy systems by a multi-disciplinary team. The process framework is created to enhance increased flexibility, usability and sustainability of the designed user interfaces. Resulting user interfaces are decoupled from the application logic, but still help to maintain consistency with the available functionality even when this changes over time. This report focuses on the usage of the task model during the analysis of the current user interface, the creation of user interface prototypes at various fidelity levels and the still ongoing realization of a flexible user interface management system to support future changes of the deployed user interfaces.

ICT Experience Prototyping in practice: Artefact Transitions

User-Centered Design (UCD) is proposed in literature as an ideal engineering method to guarantee the usability of interactive systems. In practice, however, most enterprises are rather sceptical about the benefits of UCD for in-house or outsourced developments, e.g. due to perceived complexity, duration and cost of the UCD approaches. In this paper, we describe the actual lessons learnt after collaboration with companies, where these correspond to UCD promises, and which methodological gaps we discovered when carrying out the experience prototyping cases

COnCEPT - Developing Intelligent Information Systems to Support Colloborative Working Across Design Teams

Rapid developments in hardware and software are creating opportunities to enhance the user experience. For example, advances in social analytics can provide near instant feedback. State of the art information extraction tools, filtering, categorization and presentation mechanisms all greatly facilitate knowledge exploitation activities. However, these technologies are not yet fully integrated into modern business systems. This paper describes research being undertaken in order to develop a new collaborative creative design platform (COnCEPT) aimed at investigating of new data-mining and collaboration technologies in order to enhance the information systems of future businesses. This paper describes the software architecture and the components, together with the design principles which underpin the design of the new COnCEPT platform, which is being developed to address the needs of professional design teams working collaboratively in a professional context

Finding a needle in a haystack: an interactive video archive explorer for professional video searchers

Professional video searchers typically have to search for particular video fragments in a vast video archive that contains many hours of video data. Without having the right video archive exploration tools, this is a difficult and time consuming task that induces hours of video skimming. We propose the video archive explorer, a video exploration tool that provides visual representations of automatically detected concepts to facilitate individual and collaborative video search tasks. This video archive explorer is developed by employing a user-centred methodology, which ensures that the tool is more likely to fit to the end user needs. A qualitative evaluation with professional video searchers shows that the combination of automatic video indexing, interactive visualisations and user-centred design can result in an increased usability, user satisfaction and productivity.Haesen M., Meskens J., Luyten K., Coninx K., Becker J.H., Tuytelaars T., Poulisse G.-J., Pham The P., Moens M.-F., ''Finding a needle in a haystack: an interactive video archive explorer for professional video searchers'', Multimedia tools and applications, vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 331-356, 2013.status: publishe