The prospect of ubiquitous computing in everyday life urges us to raise basic design issues pertaining to how we will live with, and not only use, computers. To design for everyday life involves much more than enabling people to accomplish certain tasks more effectively, and therefore, traditional approaches to human-computer interaction that focus on usability are not sufficient. To support critical discussion of, and reflection upon, the design of everyday computational things, both new design philosophies and a richer collection of design examples are needed. This thesis reports on the development of a design philosophy based on investigations of the design space of everyday computational things. Using experimental design, a collection of design examples

The following paper describes a set of methods that is currently used in a study of the task performance process of patent engineers within the Swedish Patent- and Registration Office (SPRO) 1. The focus of the study is to investigate the relationship between the user’s work-task and the information seeking and retrieval process. The study is performed within a real life work setting where patent engineers are performing real work tasks involving real information needs. This paper will focus on and describe a set of data collection methods used in our study. Generally, IR studies are performed within a controlled laboratory environment with controlled variables and design or simulated information need. We argue that we need to take a broader perspective on the information seeking and retrieval in order to understand the task performance process and elicit requirements for information systems design.

Modern computer systems routinely present information to the user as a combination of text and diagrammatic images, described as "graphical user interfaces". Practitioners and researchers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) generally believe that the value of these diagrammatic representations is derived from metaphorical reasoning; they communicate abstract information by depicting a physical situation from which the abstractions can be inferred. This assumption has been prevalent in HCI research for over 20 years, but has seldom been tested experimentally. This thesis analyses the reasons why diagrams are believed to assist with abstract reasoning. It then presents the results of a series of experiments testing the contribution of metaphor to comprehension, problem solving, explanation and memory tasks carried out using a range of different diagrams. The results indicate that explicit metaphors provide surprisingly little benefit for cognitive tasks using diagrams as an external re...

INTRODUCTION User-Centered Design (UCD) has yielded many forms of design practices in which various characteristics of the context of use are considered. Among these, task analysis is widely recognized as one fundamental way not only to ensure some user-centered design (Hackos & Redish, 1998) but to improve the understanding of how a user may interact with a user interface to accomplish a given interactive task. A task model is often defined as a description of an interactive task to be performed by the user of an application through the application's user interface. Individual elements in a task model represent specific actions that the user may undertake. Information on subtask ordering as well as conditions on task execution is also included in the model. 135 LE071-06 LE071-Diaper & Stanton LE071-Diaper-v2.cls July 30, 2003 11:20 Char Count= 0 136 LIMBOURG AND VANDERDONCKT Task analysis methods have been introduced from disciplines with different backgrounds, different concerns,

www.dimi.uniud.it/giorgio Abstract. The paper discusses how accessibility helps in extending the range of goals that users (disabled or not) can achieve, and how it fails to increase user bandwidth for achieving those goals. The paper then illustrates how transcoders that satisfy a set of requirements, can effectively deal with the problem of generating, on the fly, specialized user interfaces that would support a more universal web access leading to a greater bandwidth. An informal analysis of a commercially available text-transcoder is used as an example of what can be done. 1.

The birth of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1993, particularly its graphical user interface, offered marketers opportunities that were previously unimaginable. The WWW allows advanced marketing activities and more particularly interactive marketing, as the user is actively involved in responding to the vendor’s promotion campaign. Interactive TV, also referred to as iTV, combines the appeal and mass audience of traditional TV with the interactive features such as those currently available on the Web. Although personalisation is a practice used widely on the Internet by many sites, applying personalisation techniques over interactive television presents a number of difficulties. In this paper we focus on the design and testing process of the User Interface (UI) for the Interactive & Personalized Advertisement TV viewer. We argue that there are a lot of challenges involved in the designing of interactive TV applications. These are related with the differences of the medium from the traditional PC based Information Systems in terms of input and output devices, viewing environment, number of users and low level of expertise in PC usage.

ELECT BiLAT is a prototype game-based simulation for Soldiers to practice conducting bilateral engagements in a cultural context. The prototype provides students with the experience of preparing for a meeting including familiarization with the cultural context, gathering intelligence, conducting a meeting and negotiating when possible, and following up on meeting agreements as appropriate. The ELECT BiLAT architecture is based on a commercial game engine that is integrated with research technologies to enable the use of virtual human characters, scenario customization, as well as coaching, feedback and tutoring. Because the prototype application is intended to be a learning environment, pedagogy has been central throughout development. The project followed a fivephase process: (1) analyze the training domain; (2) develop a story board prototype; (3) implement a computer version of the training prototype; (4) refine training objectives and link their conditions and standards to game activities; and (5) develop training support content for students, instructors, and training developers. The goal is an authorable game-based environment that uses the pedagogy of guided discovery for training Soldiers in the conduct of bilateral engagements within a specific cultural context. 1.

Software is a major expense for most organizations and is on the critical path to almost all organizational activities. Individual software development organizations in general strive to develop higher quality systems at a lower cost for both their internal and external customers. Yet the processes used to develop such software are still very primitive in the way that experience is incorporated. Learning is often from

The Experience Management System (EMS) is aimed at supporting the capture and reuse of software-related experience, based on the Experience Factory concept. It is being developed for use in a multinational software engineering consultancy, Q-Labs. Currently, a prototype EMS exists and has been evaluated. This paper focuses on the EMS architecture, underlying data model, implementation, and user interface.

features and structure of Web-based online IR systems