Ethics and Design in the Brazilian Context

Often driven by practical and immediate requirements, more and more people are incorporating technology into a variety of aspects of their lives, often without reflecting on the consequences of using them. On the other hand, studies on interactive system development that lead to behavioral change have been gaining ground on the agenda of large HCI conferences. This movement brings to the forefront the fundamental issues of ethics in design and technology use. A designer’s intentions, when directing certain actions or behaviors, are not always explicit or desired by the stakeholders affected by the use of the technology. Systems that induce an undesired purchase, or even those that use conditioning strategies to cause a behavioral change are examples of such intentions. The challenge proposed is therefore about the relationship between design and personal freedom in a way that these technology users do not become victims, either passively or submissively, of the effects of its use. This advance allows for the redefinition of the relationship between man and technology, and the application of new forms of designing and developing interactive systems that take into account the ethical aspects of this relationship

Breaking the News: First Impressions Matter on Online News

A growing number of people are changing the way they consume news, replacing the traditional physical newspapers and magazines by their virtual online versions or/and weblogs. The interactivity and immediacy present in online news are changing the way news are being produced and exposed by media corporations. News websites have to create effective strategies to catch people's attention and attract their clicks. In this paper we investigate possible strategies used by online news corporations in the design of their news headlines. We analyze the content of 69,907 headlines produced by four major global media corporations during a minimum of eight consecutive months in 2014. In order to discover strategies that could be used to attract clicks, we extracted features from the text of the news headlines related to the sentiment polarity of the headline. We discovered that the sentiment of the headline is strongly related to the popularity of the news and also with the dynamics of the posted comments on that particular news.Comment: The paper appears in ICWSM 201

ABSTRACT A Case Study for Evaluating Interface Design

Communicability evaluation is a method based on semiotic engineering that aims at assessing how designers communicate to users their design intents and chosen interactive principles, and thus complements traditional usability evaluation methods. In this paper, we present a case study in which we evaluate how communicablity tagging of an application changes along users’ learning curves. Our main goal was to have indications of how communicability evaluation along a learning period helps provide valuable information about interface designs, and identify communicative and interactive problems, as users become more proficient in the application

Characterizing the Effectiveness of Twitter Hashtags to Detect and Track Online Population Sentiment

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI’12, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA. ACM 978-1-4503-1016-1/12/05. In this paper we describe the preliminary results and future directions of a research in progress, which aims at assessing the hashtag effectiveness as a resource for sentiment analysis expressed on Twitter. The results so far support our hypothesis that hashtags may facilitate the detection and automatic tracking of online population sentiment about different events