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The COVID-19 pandemic marked an important breakthrough in human progress: from working habits to social life, the world population's behaviours changed according to the new lifestyle requirements. In this changing environment, university courses and learning methods evolved along with other "remote" working activities. For this quasi-experimental study, we discuss the effectiveness of the changes made by the LUMSA University in Rome, comparing two different groups of students who attended a master's course with blended and fully remote methodologies. Here, we focused our attention on the paradigm shift, comparing the data gathered during the blended course in the 2019/2020 academic year with data gathered during the same course, but conducted fully online, in the academic year 2020/2021. Considering the sample size and type, the group comparison was made using a non-parametric test (U-test). The statistical analysis results suggest that there was no substantial difference between the students' performance, confirming that the course changes made to adapt to the pandemic situation were successful and that learning effectiveness was preserved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the development of systems whose end users are professional people working in a specific domain (e.g., medicine, geology, mechanical engineering); they are expert in that domain, but not necessarily expert in nor even conversant with computer science. In several work organizations, end users need to tailor their software systems to better adapt them to their requirements and even to create or modify software artifacts. These are end-user development activities and are the focus of this paper. A model of the interaction between users and systems, which also takes into account their reciprocal coevolution during system usage, is discussed. This model is used to define a methodology aimed at designing software environments that allow end users to become designers of their own tools. The methodology is illustrated by discussing two experimental cases. Index Terms--Design methodology, user-centered design, user interface human factors, visual languages.

The digital age of the future is 'not out there to be discovered', but it needs to be 'designed'. The design challenge has to address questions about how we want to live, work, and learn (as individuals and as communities) and what we value and appreciate, e.g.: reflecting on quality of life and creating inclusive societies. An overriding design trade-off for the digital age is whether new developments will increase the digital divide or will create more inclusive societies. Sustaining inclusive societies means allowing people of all ages and all abilities to exploit information technologies for personally meaningful activities. Meta-design fosters the design of socio-technical environments that end-user developers can modify and evolve at use time to improve their quality of life and favour their inclusion in the society. This paper describes three case studies in the domain of assistive technologies in which end users themselves cannot act as end-user developers, but someone else (e.g.: a caregiver or a clinician) must accept this role requiring multi-tiered architectures. The design trade-offs and requirements for meta-design identified in the context of the case studies and other researchers' projects are described to inform the development of future socio-technical environments focused on social inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including trade-off between autonomy and control in socio-technical system design, role of meta-design as a way to foster social inclusion in the domain of assistive technologies, and design trade-offs.

Recent technologies are offering today many possibilities to end users, which ask for continuous support in a variety of situations. Internet of things (IoTs) and the proliferation of smart devices are offering many opportunities that raise the need to standardise protocols for their interoperability and interaction languages for their management. This study proposes EUDroid, a system composed of a mobile application and an IoT device used as a pill reminder to allow the patients to correctly take their prescribed drugs. A web server stores and manages the therapies that can be defined by the end users. The web server also manages the communication between the app and the device. In order to validate the management of the therapies, a formal language has been proposed. It describes the behaviour of different components of the IoT device, such as LEDs or buzzers, and defines when, with which delay, and for how long time a given event will last, to manage technical concepts related to smart devices for supporting them in following therapies more accurately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Several studies have shown that involving users in design processes is a key factor in understanding user needs and essential for designing computer systems capable of providing valuable user experiences. However, many practitioners do not emphasize user needs sufficiently and neglect user involvement in software design and development. The UCD Sprint is a recently proposed, step-by-step, cost-effective process that focuses on involving users in design activities. This article reports a mixed-method study in which, for the first time, practitioners working in companies used the UCD Sprint; the study’s main objective was to investigate the impact of the UCD Sprint on practitioners’ design practices. The results show that, among the various activities associated with this process, those that involved users were particularly appreciated by practitioners. Thus, the UCD Sprint can enhance the innovativeness of company design practices; it enables practitioners to obtain sufficient information to create systems that fit users’ needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a 63-participant user study that compares two widely known systems supporting end users in creating trigger-action rules for the Internet of Things and Ambient Intelligence scenarios. The user study is the first stage of a research agenda that concerns the implementation of a novel conceptual framework for the design and continuous evolution of 'sentient multimedia systems', namely socio-technical systems, where people and many kinds of hardware/software components (sensors, robots, smart devices, web services, etc.) interact with one another through the exchange of multimedia information, to give rise to intelligent, proactive behaviors. The conceptual framework is structured along three layers - physical, inference and user - and is based on an information space of events, conditions and actions, linked together in Event-Condition-Action rules and operating according to the interconnection metaphor. The results of the user study have provided some indications for the implementation of the user layer, suggesting which could be the most suitable interaction style for rule design by a community of end users (e.g. a family) and which issues should be addressed in such a wide context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel participatory approach to the design of customized and tailorable visual interactive systems; it includes end users as domain experts in the design team. A design method is described which leads to two different visual specifications, one suitable for end users and the other suitable for software engineers. It is also shown how this second specification is directly mapped to the implementation architecture, based on XML technology. The discussion is supported by the description of an example in the mechanical engineering domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]