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The use of robust software engineering processes is essential in the design and development of interactive systems. This ensures that software is both functionally correct and also usable in the required context. There are a variety of software engineering techniques that can be used to consider different aspects of a system under construction, and at different stages in the development process. There is, however, a natural tension between formal approaches (typically used in the domain of safety-critical systems to consider functional correctness) and informal design approaches, which focus on users and user requirements in a manner which is accessible by stakeholders. In this paper we present two new approaches which enable a tighter coupling of informal design requirements with formal models. We present examples of these two approaches and discuss the benefits that transformations between the informal and formal provide. We also discuss the current limitations of such work along with recommendations about how these might be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gathering qualitative user data in a user-centered design process is one of the very early steps to create interactive systems. However, generating structured models from qualitative data towards descriptions that can be used for the implementation of interactive systems and prototypes raises various challenges, such as a strong influence of the modeler's knowledge and their interpretation of the gathered qualitative data. Introducing the modeler's bias may result in a system implementation which does not fully represent the information provided in the original qualitative data, generating an unwanted gap between what the user needs and what the system provides. To address this challenge, in this paper we present a structured and manual transformation method, which enables a modeler to create BPMN models from interview data by reducing the modeler's individual influence on the resulting BPMN model. We evaluate this approach in the context of the implementation of persuasive systems, which should support changing unwanted work-related habits. Therefore, we conducted unstructured interviews with office workers, thinking aloud interviews, in which we asked office workers to imagine a situation where they showed an unwanted work-related habit and to describe this habit together with an alternative behavior. In a quantitative experimental study, we then asked study participants to create BPMN models either with or without our new transformation method. Our analyses showed that when using our method, different participants created very similar BPMN models of the habits, even with little training. We conclude that the major contribution of our work is that the presented method can be applied to the creation of structured models from unstructured interview data. This method that makes use of rich interview data is suitable for the design and implementation of interactive systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comprehensive formal engineering approach for the development of gaze guiding as an adaptive computer-based job aid to support semi-automated technical control tasks. Major requirement for this engineering method was to present a model-based approach, which on the one hand offers a coherent integration of various heterogeneous descriptions of the system, the standard operating procedures to be applied, and the used gaze guiding, and an algorithmic transformation into an executable form on the other. The latter is used as part of a runtime system or execution framework that integrates gaze guiding into an existing graphical user interface as an overlay. To demonstrate the suitability of the resulting model that enables gaze guiding, we present a use case for the modeling approach and we conducted a user study with 140 participants who worked on three different types of SOPs. The study showed the positive impact of the gaze guiding and its potential to suite as an adaptive computer-based job aid. The results confirmed findings from previous studies and showed decreased numbers of errors during the execution of the start-up procedure if gaze guiding was used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Controlling and observing complex systems is central to the study of human–machine interaction. In our understanding, there is much to be gained from integrating formal modeling and analysis, including the reconfiguration of user interfaces, with the development of user interfaces with high usability. To this end, we introduce a new approach to modeling and reconfiguration of user interfaces jointly with a newly developed set of tools for interactive and visual creation and automatic transformation of user interfaces' interaction logic to a formal language based on Petri nets. Reconfiguration will be embedded into a process for adapting user interfaces to the user's cognitive representation of the controlled system. This process involves practicing the use of a given user interface, adapting it to the user's needs through reconfiguration, and applying the resulting adaptations to the formally defined interaction logic. An evaluation study confirms that this process reduces errors in interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]