This paper describes a system to support humanities scholars in their interpretation of literary work. It presents a user interface and web architecture that integrates text mining, a graphical user interface and visualization, while attempting to remain easy to use by non specialists. Users can interactively read and rate documents found in a digital libraries collection, prepare training sets, review results of classification algorithms and explore possible indicators and explanations. Initial evaluation steps suggest that there is a rationale for “provocational ” text mining in literary interpretation.

Fig. 1: Creating an Astrophysics VisMashup to explore a binary star system. Abstract—Visualization is essential for understanding the increasing volumes of digital data. However, the process required to create insightful visualizations is involved and time consuming. Although several visualization tools are available, including tools with sophisticated visual interfaces, they are out of reach for users who have little or no knowledge of visualization techniques and/or who do not have programming expertise. In this paper, we propose VISMASHUP, a new framework for streamlining the creation of customized visualization applications. Because these applications can be customized for very specific tasks, they can hide much of the complexity in a visualization specification and make it easier for users to explore visualizations by manipulating a small set of parameters. We describe the framework and how it supports the various tasks a designer needs to carry out to develop an application, from mining and exploring a set of visualization specifications (pipelines), to the creation of simplified views of the pipelines, and the automatic generation of the application and its interface. We also describe the implementation of the system and demonstrate its use in two real application scenarios.

Coarse-grained approaches to customization allow the user to enable or disable groups of features at once, rather than individual features. While this may reduce the complexity of customization and encourage more users to customize, the research challenges of designing such approaches have not been fully explored. To address this limitation, we conducted an interview study with 14 professional software developers who use an integrated development environment that provides a role-based, coarse-grained approach to customization. We identify challenges of designing coarsegrained customization models, including issues of functionality partitioning, presentation, and individual differences. These findings highlight potentially critical design choices, and provide direction for future work. Author Keywords Role-based interface, adaptable and adaptive interfaces,

Personalized graphical user interfaces have the potential to reduce visual complexity and improve interaction efficiency by tailoring elements such as menus and toolbars to better suit an individual user's needs. When an interface is personalized to make useful features more accessible for a user's current task, however, there may be a negative impact on the user's awareness of the full set of available features, making future tasks more difficult. To assess this tradeoff we introduce awareness as an evaluation metric to be used in conjunction with performance. We then discuss three studies we have conducted, which show that personalized interfaces trade off awareness of unused features for performance gains on core tasks. The first two studies, previously published and presented only in summary, demonstrate this tradeoff by measuring awareness using a recognition test of unused features in the interface. The studies also evaluated two different types of personalized interfaces: a layered interfaces approach and an adaptive split menu approach. The third study, presented in full, focuses on adaptive split menus and extends results from the first two studies to show that different levels of awareness also correspond to an impact on performance when users are asked to complete new tasks. Based on all three studies and a survey of related work, we outline a design space of personalized interfaces and present several factors that could affect the tradeoff between core task performance and awareness. Finally, we provide a set of design implications that should be considered for personalized interfaces.

Digital government applications often involve web sites to provide information for citizens and visitors from essential services such as passport application or motor vehicle registration to discretionary, but highly popular applications such as recreation and parks information. Another aspect of government web sites is the delivery of statistical reports with summary tables, aggregated data resources, and extensive raw data files. This review focuses on human-computer interaction themes to improve designs of web sites and statistics visualization, especially as they relate to digital government sites. It also addresses research methods that are appropriate for digital government interfaces. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2.[User Interfaces] Graphical User Interfaces, multimedia, online help, multi-layer interfaces, web site design, information visualization, statistical data presentation, digital government

Multi-Layered Design (Ben Shneiderman) is a way to adapt applications to multiple user categories with different knowledge and skills. The application is divided into layers which could be activated one by one. Each layer holds a set of functionality. When the users have gained confidence and learned the first layer they can progress to layers with more task functionality. We are conducting a study at the Clinic of Oral Medicine at Sahlgrenska University hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden. The user group is heterogeneous and there are many different needs. The environmental context is also affecting the productivity within the applications used. The design of the interfaces should be adapted to the various types of users at hand. Multi-Layered Design has therefore been tested for a new application, MedImager, within the MedView project. In this paper the theoretical framework of the Multi-Layered Design will be presented and the application in which the method is used. The user groups have been identified and a prototype has been produced. We are also presenting the work towards a general work process for identification of the layers in the Multi-Layered Design. Future work and plans for Multi-Layered Design will be outlined. Keywords: Multi-Layered Design, User Centred Design, Case Study, and Work Process. 1.

We discuss the composition of layers in a Multi-Layer User Interface. Specifically, we define Features Layers to be layers composed of features from a single category (e.g. photo editing features might make up one feature layer and text formatting features another). We contrast this with Mixed Layers or layers that contain a mix of features from many categories. The finergrained Feature Layers give users greater control over the exact features added to the application. We also present two new methods for automatically adding new layers to an interface based on the user’s prior experience with similar applications and based on how the application is launched. We describe a blogging application we have implemented to explore these concepts. 1

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Abstract. We identify several challenges in conducting a large-scale, online field study with 90 users of an open-source, integrated development environment. By reflecting on the benefits and challenges of specific methodological decisions and contextual constraints of this study, we hope to provide insight for other researchers designing similar types of studies, as well as to encourage discussion about how best to balance these trade-offs. In particular, we highlight the online nature of this study, and the impact of working with an open-source, extensible software application. 1

This paper shows an approach to deal with the changing requirements for a user interface for the Virtual Data Centre (VDC). The VDC is a system, which offers centralised access to heterogeneous data and spatially distributed databases about nature and landscape (Frehner&Braendli, 2006). The system was designed for extendibility in terms of adding more databases and business logic which is exposed as services. However, some existing business logic does not fit into the currently operational Web application because it is based on different technology and because the existing Webuser interface is too restrictive. Also, due to technological advances, further business logic has to be considered for integration, while avoiding an overly complicated user interface. Furthermore, the VDC is going to be opened for the public. Therefore, based on a security policy, access restrictions will have to be implemented. In addition, two categories of users, namely experts and novices, with their specific behaviour have to be accounted for. This paper starts with the basic conditions for the VDC. It will then show what specific challenges we are facing when the Web interface is revised and how we are intending to overcome those difficulties.