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Integration of human-centered design in a company's software development practice requires a thorough analysis of its current practices by both researchers and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the experiments that evaluated the pedagogical efficiency of the Logiocando hypermedia as compared to traditional classroom instruction. Information on Logiocando hypermedia; Details of the evaluation conducted on Logiocando; Discussion of the hypermedia's test section. INSET: Previous Research.

Visual interaction processes are modeled in this paper as sequences of visual sentences in which for each visual sentence only a limited set of user actions is possible. We introduce the notion of "dynamic visual language" as a weakly ordered set of visual sentences characterized by the presence of common elements. We present a formal model of derivation of visual sentences in a dynamic visual language in which each visual sentence specifies the possible actions which can be performed on it and the possible transformations it can go through. In this way, we offer a formal setting in which the interaction process can be formally specified. A user interface can be derived from the formal specification, so that it embeds proper context elements which limit user disorientation. The concepts are illustrated by the user interaction with a prototype of a digital library developed at the University of Bari. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the method for Systematic Usability Evaluation (SUE) of hypermedia. Use of Abstract Tasks; Advantage of SUE inspection; Description of the activities to be carried out by evaluators during inspection.