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Quantitative ranking between alternatives and the selection of the most promising one is highly challenging. Typically, multiple criteria need to be granted and weighed based on task and user requirements. It is getting more complicated with increasing numbers of requirements and stakeholders now common in feature-rich control systems. Hence, there is a need for a systematic method of dealing with Multi-Criteria-Decision-Making (MCDM) problems. In this paper, we develop a systematic approach by integrating the House-of-Quality (HoQ) method with Multi-Attribute-Utility-Theory (MAUT). It is shown that combining HoQ and MAUT allows the integration of different task and user requirements. This method is used to perform criteria comparisons, which results neither in an overestimation nor an underestimation of the criterion's influence and consequently provides more accurate and predictable results. The methods are applied to the evaluation of three different collaborative software environments in order to determine their suitability for a typical collaboration task.

Part 1: Beyond Computers: Wearables, Humans, And Things – WHAT!; International audience; This contribution shows how we discovered, by teaching and design, the need for ICT support in the domain of cultural heritage collections. We show examples of current situations with, both, workable solutions and logistic problems regarding the maintenance, documentation, and availability of precious artifacts to keep cultures alive. We point to currently available techniques to incorporate cultural heritage artifacts in a cloud based structure for knowledge and communication that might enable the continuation of cultures in an easy and safe way.

Earlier work within the CSCW community treated the notion of awareness as an important resource for supporting shared work and work-related activities. However, new trends have emerged in recent times that utilize the notion of awareness beyond work-related activities and explore social, emotional and interpersonal aspects of people’s everyday lives. To investigate this broader notion of awareness, we carried out a field study using ethnographic and cultural probe based methods in an academic setting. Our aim was to study staff members’ everyday activities in their natural surroundings; understand how awareness beyond work-related activities plays out and how it is dealt with. Our field study results shed light on two broad and sometimes overlapping themes of interaction between staff members: 1) self-representations and 2) casual encounters. We provide examples from the field illustrating these two themes. In general, our results show how awcreness is closely associated with people’s everyday lives, where they creatively and artfully utilize ordinary resources from their environments to carry out their routine activities. Using the results of our field study, we describe the design of a situated display called Panorama that is meant to support non-critical, non-work-related awareness within work environments.

Part 1: Beyond Computers: Wearables, Humans, And Things – WHAT!; International audience; This contribution shows how the experienced location of data or information, and of computing, changed since the first general use of information and communication technology. We show how many current and future non-professional users will develop a view of locality for physical tagged entry points to resources that are in fact nodes in an, often global, network.

Cultural heritage is to a large extent "materialized" in artefacts of many different types: physical objects, scripts, stories, archives, traditions, collections. Cultures, however, will only live if communities of aware people maintain, cherish, relive, and contribute to the heritage. Current IT and the availability of social media provide potential support for stimulating and maintaining living heritage. We show how teaching interaction design can be specialized to focus on the integration of artefacts with IT support to develop an attitude as well as a supporting environment to better safeguard a shared living memory.

In this demo we present BREF, a lightweight BRowser-based Evaluation Framework for easily conducting large-scale visualization-based evaluations of interaction tasks running in web browsers. BREF offers great flexibility to create, manage, and analyze single or multiple evaluations. Built-in assistants simplify and reduce the management workload for a large number of participants, tasks, and complementary questionnaires. Subjects can easily participate after logging in on any browser without the need of installing additional software.

Computer supported collaborative work supports the interaction and joint task solving between humans by setting a machine or computer in-between. Similarly, collaborative environments support decision-makings incorporating different points of view and a variety of competences. As such, the identification and selection of the underlying requirements involved in collaboration is a challenging task. In order to facilitate this task, we performed a thorough literature review with the aim to discern such requirements. The result is a set of qualitative criteria that can be applied to generic computer supported collaboration environments. Furthermore, the mapping of the generic catalogue to a specific collaboration task is demonstrated.

The results of a study on HCI education in 2014 prompted the proposal to create a living curriculum that responds to the needs of multiple stakeholders. A workshop held during CHI 2014 signaled coalescence in the requirements for the establishment of said curriculum. This workshop seeks to further explore among multiple diverse HCI educators on how to proceed with the establishment of an HCI living curriculum that integrates different cultural contexts and requirements. The workshop will also focus particularly on the African context of HCI education. The envisaged outcome is a plan to proceed with the creation of such a culturally sensitive living curriculum/a and its implementation.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a term known since the early 1980s. In HCI, the user plays the central role, much more than the computer hardware or software by itself. It is a multi-disciplinary research field, populated by researchers and practitioners from areas like psychology and cognitive sciences, ergonomics, sociology, computer science, graphic design, business, and more. In order to build really usable interfaces, the knowledge and engagement of every single related field are basic prerequisites. We are taking a look on how selected areas have contributed to HCI in recent years.

User centered design is a relatively young design approach. Over the years, user centered design changed its scope. However, the concept of usability does not just expand by broadening the view on ease of use and learning. Experience is added in the nineties and in 2006 we find Apple suggest its iPod users to “Enjoy Uncertainty.” The history of user centered design (or human-computer interaction, or cognitive ergonomics) shows the development of the design approach as a movement in different dimensions: from the reign of functionality to attention to individual users in context; from user control to experience and entertainment; and from a culturally defined cost-benefit goal to perspective on a multitude of design cultures and cultures of use.

We attempt to contribute to a general theory of requirements change from a goal-oriented and viewpoints-driven angle. To practitioners, this knowledge is relevant to anticipate changes in certain types of requirements, which may shorten the project's timeline, reduce costs, and increase product quality. Initially, we followed the common assumptions that what should be on a system is demanded by goals to achieve and what should not be on a system is demanded by goal states to avoid. However, requirements engineering of a diversity of systems (capacity and warehouse management, COTS PCs, and a Braille mouse) revealed that must requirements are predicted by goals to avoid (!) and won't requirements by goals to approach (!). Expectations about the positive or negative impact (valence) of requirements on goals played a moderating role. We unfold the gradual discovery of this "goals-to-requirements chiasm" (CHI-effect or χ-effect), claiming that variability in agreement to positive or negative requirements is predicted by goals of opposite polarity. We found that whether the χ-effect occurred or not, depended on the alignment of stakeholder viewpoints on goals and requirements. Comments from practitioners are included. Categories & Subject Descriptors: H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems-Human information processing; K.6.3 [Management of Computing and Information Systems]: Software Management-Software development. General Terms: Requirements Engineering, Human Factors, Theory. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Most software development approaches and curricular guidelines seem to ignore the fact that in many software systems the user interface is a decisive factor for product quality. As a result, it is often designed rather independently of the system’s functionality. Chances are then that it does not get the attention it deserves. In the approach to software development we sketch, the design of the user interface and the design of the functionality go hand in hand. We give a number of examples of user interface problems, and illustrate how these can be caught early if a more integrated approach is taken. We conclude with an outline of a minimal course on humancomputer interaction that we feel should be part of everyone’s software engineering or computer science curriculum.

Computer Science has evolved towards a discipline with different branches. Software is designed, produced and linked taking into account different viewpoints. This process typically involves multidisciplinary teams: Front End Developers, (OO)Programmers, Database Engineers. Software developers, who were educated in different computing disciplines, meet on the shop floor, where they link together software that was designed from different viewpoints. In this paper, the emphasis is on human characteristics, rather than on the formal properties of programming and modeling languages. Do the involved computing practitioners refer to the same concepts when they use the same words? A preliminary version of this study [1] addressed the assessment of differences in mental representations of abstract entities involved in programming and modeling. In this extended version we report the results of an experiment, designed to compare mental representations of abstract concepts with mental models described in the literature. We point at differences between groups of students, enrolled in different computing curricula, and explore possible explanations.

In this paper, we show how different elements of awareness information in groupware systems can be defined in terms of conveying attentive states of the participants. Different kinds of awareness are distinguished: at macro- and micro-level, the latter consisting of workspace awareness and conversational awareness. We summarize the functional elements of micro-level awareness, organizing them hierarchically in terms of their relation to the attention of participants. We further discuss how groupware systems can capture and represent awareness by means of attention-based metaphors, and give an example of a virtual meeting room in which the gaze direction of the participants is conveyed by means of modern ‘imaging’ eyetracking technology.

The task analysis methods discussed in this presentation stem from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Ethnography (as applied for the design of Computer Supported Cooperative Work CSCW), different disciplines that often are considered conflicting approaches when applied to the same design problems. Both approaches have their strength and weakness, and an integration of them does add value to the early stages of design of cooperation technology. In order to develop an integrated method for groupware task analysis (GTA) a conceptual framework is presented that allows a systematic perspective on complex work phenomena. The framework features a triple focus, considering (a) people, (b) work, and (c) the situation. Integrating various task-modeling approaches requires vehicles for making design information explicit, for which an object oriented formalism will be suggested. GTA consists of a method and framework that have been developed during practical design exercises. Examples from some of these cases will illustrate our approach.

The main objective of the study is to get insight in the knowledge representations of complex financial products in novices and experts and in the effectiveness of the reasoning and decision making strategies that are used to solve problems in the finance domain.It is not known how and why consumers make decisions on finance. How is knowledge about money, debt and personal finance represented in novices and experts; and if and how do ideas about debt and money influence decisions on household finance? The study aims to obtain insight in these questions by investigating novices and experts on 4 cognitive aspects: representations, decisions making, knowledge and communication on finance.Research approach -- A number of studies and experiments will be carried out in for this doctoral thesis. The first study is planned for August 2012. Two groups of subjects, consumers of financial products (novices) and financial professionals (experts) will participate in a study using the Teach back method. This is a qualitative method to research mental representations of complex systems. Using the Teach back method, it will be analyzed if there is consistency in representations within both groups and differences between both groups will be investigated. The results of the study will be used for creating two or more personas. Personas are models of people. Using personas several experiments will be designed. These experiments will involve methods to create a common ground for finance concepts for novices and experts. One experiment will be the design of a workshop where groups of participants share knowledge on money and finance. A second experiment will be an online platform that supports knowledge sharing between novices and experts.

In this experience report, we provide a case study on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in higher education, developing an open source interactive learning environment to support a blended course.Our aim is to improve the quality of adult distance learning, ultimately involving peers worldwide, by developing learning environments as flexible as possible regardless of the culture and context of use, of individual learning style and age of the learners. Our example concerns a course of Service Design where the teacher was physically present only intermittently for part of the course while in the remaining time students worked in teams using our online learning environment.We developed a structure where students are guided through discovery learning and mutual teaching. We will show how we started from the students' authentic goals and how we supported them by a simple structure of pacing the discovery process and merging theoretical understanding with practice in real life.Based on these first empirical results practical guidelines have been developed regarding improvements on the structure provided for the learning material and on the interaction facilities for students, teachers and instructional designers.

As the world comes together, culture becomes an issueWe have been designing for each other for many centuries. Originally, we knew our clients of design, who were members of our tribe, or living in the same village. At different locations on the globe, people designed for the same functionality, sometimes in parallel without being aware. In communities far remote from each other different (often unique) ways of written communication were designed and different countries claim the invention of a variation of the printing press or gunpowder. If we look at the design of clothing, we easily discover cultural differences related to taste as well as to context of use.The globe is rapidly shrinking. Most new designs will be quickly discovered by strangers that live in far away locations. In fact, recent design efforts often aim at world wide adoption. But reaching new potential users does not mean it fits them all, like it did fit those that lived in the designers own village.

We improved a tool to support design experts and nonexpert engineers to share design knowledge. Our approach is a systematic and iterative design of a new tool variant, including high fidelity prototyping and assessment with students in real design cases. Iterative design allowed us to improve the learnability of the tool. Patterns libraries commonly are provided through relatively unstructured lists ("collections"). Tools will help engineers by making the design space (including an overview of context dependent relevance of available design patterns) explicit.

Motivation -- If modelling is included in the requirements analysis phase of a systematic interaction design method, it mostly focuses on some kind of formalism, e.g., task modelling and requirements specification. However, when designing in collaboration with non-expert, stakeholders this will not work.Approach -- This workshop will allow exchange of ideas, experiences, techniques and tools for collaboration with stakeholders of interaction design early in the design process, in order to aim at a more creative as well as more user-centred requirement development.Limitations/Implications -- Our finding will in no way guarantee "the best design solution", but they show a type of creative collaboration between stakeholders and designers in a very early design phase, which allows considering and exploring new solutions before these need to be prototyped or implemented.Originality/Value -- The techniques we intend to discuss are in no way new, however their application early in design in this open ended approach is not well documented and, hence, awareness and comparing notes on successes and failure experiences will allow us to learn from each other and help us develop a general understanding among interaction designers.Take away message -- Non-formal modelling tools and techniques for early collaboration with stakeholders are relatively cheap and, at the other hand, uniquely stimulating techniques for identifying both the boundaries and the opportunities of the design space for interactive systems.

This research is about the intersection between technological innovations and adoption in society for the purpose of adult learning. More specifically it aims to develop an e-learning environment, to be available, both as a standalone learning marketplace, and as support for classroom based learning. The intention is using the open source process to improve the quality of learning at any time and anywhere and make it as flexible as possible towards the culture, learning style and age of the learners. We use the open source process in an iterative project. In the first iteration a sample of 30 higher education students has been involved in a blended course in Service Design. After the first empirical results at the start of a three year iterative development, practical guidelines have been developed for the learning environment's improvements, for the interaction of teachers and instructional designers with the environment, as well as developing structure and format of learning resources to be included.

Motivation -- The purpose of this paper is to analyse how students experience different modalities in online ICT learning. The general aim is to develop a system that maps learning activities within their own context to different modalities.Research approach -- A first study was conducted in which about 30 students were asked to view three online presentations on three different topics and presented in three different modalities. After each presentation they were asked to evaluate the experience in a questionnaire..Findings/Design -- Despite the fact that no significant differences were found on how students experience different modalities, there are indications that the results would be different with a larger control groupResearch limitations/Implications -- Only Italian university students whose native language is not English participates in the study. This might influence the results. We intend to repeat this study with other student populations and for other learning domains.Originality/Value -- E-learning today comes in different modalities. The choice for a certain modality nowadays is often technology or teacher driven. In this research we want to investigate e-learning from a user-centred perspective to discover in what situations what modalities enhance the learning experience of students most.

In this chapter, we discuss the potentialities of 3D virtual worlds in education. We argue that assignments in virtual worlds and a constructivist approach go hand in hand. We identify the aspects of virtual worlds (such as ActiveWorlds and SecondLife) that make them useful for education and research, as well as aspects that do not. We found that intertwining real-life instructional courses with virtual constructivist courses was very promising in terms of the learning experience. We demonstrated this 2-fold approach with the “Virtual Worlds” course at the Hogeschool Utrecht University of Professional Education.

This chapter addresses awareness support to enhance teamwork in co-located collaborative environments. In particular, the authors focus on the concept of situational awareness which is essential for successful team collaboration. Mutual situational awareness leads to informal social interactions, development of shared working cultures which are essential aspects of maintaining working relationships. First, an overview of the studies on team coordination and situational awareness support is presented. Second, a collaborative working environment is described for scientific teams in a molecular biology omics experimentation domain. Then, the results of practical case studies are discussed, as well as situational awareness support for scientific teams in collaborative environments. Finally, the authors discuss practical challenges in design and evaluation of group support systems for collaborative working environments and our multi-level analysis approach. The chapter gives new insights into how shared displays support group awareness, and how to design and evaluate interactive systems and visualisations that afford awareness in order to stimulate existing and new forms of collaboration in advanced working environments.

In this paper we explore a suitable prototyping technique and approach for an experience-oriented design process without the need for rich equipped labs and resources. The key solution lies in 'mixed-fidelity' prototypes with interaction-enabled 'front-ends' and simple 'back-ends'. We illustrate and validate this approach mainly with a student project done by the authors dealing with environmental aware mobile information.

In this paper we explore the concept of experience and develop premises for the design for experience. In industrial practice designers frequently lack sufficient expertise to design for experience. We provide a view on how to support the design for experience in those cases where a single designer or a design team is not fully equipped to do the job without help. We will illustrate and validate our approach with a design case study from practice.

Despite growing pattern collections in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), both on the Internet [1-3] and in books [4, 5], these collections have usability problems when being used by those software engineers, who lack expertise in human-centered design. In this paper we report on the development of a tool that is intended to improve accessibility and usability of HCI design patterns for engineers. We aim at a tool that is simple and safe to be used without expert knowledge. Such a tool can be used in what could be labeled "discount usability engineering". A new type of HCI pattern language combined with a supportive tool is intended to overcome some of the gaps these engineers have in HCI-background.

At times, the differences between business and science place considerable stress on their relationship. Scientists blame businesses for staking their claims for product quality based upon unfounded and unjustified assumptions. Businesses blame scientists for doing research that is irrelevant outside the laboratory. In HCI and CSCW, such controversies are counter-productive. When problems arise in information systems of large organizations, researchers will be forced to do science outside the laboratory. In this paper, we analyze the differences between the business models of science and commerce, and conclude that the common interest lies in obtaining information about system and stakeholder requirements that is reliable as well as valid. This can be achieved by applying controlled field experiments, combining a laboratory set-up with high ecological validity. Three business cases (i.e. VirTouch, The Mediator Group, and Exact Holding) illustrate that our common ground can initiate research that serves both scientific and business purposes. We round off our discussion with some recommendations on science-business cooperation and we will end on an ethical note.

Designing Groupware systems requires methods and tools that cover all aspects of Groupware systems. We present a method that utilizes known theoretical insights and makes them usable in practice. In our method, the design of Groupware systems is driven by an extensive task analysis followed by structured design and iterative evaluation using usability criteria. Using a combination of multiple complementary representations and techniques, a wide range of aspects of Groupware design is covered. The method is built on our experiences and is used in practice by several companies and educational institutes in Europe. We define the design process, the models needed and the tools that support the design process.

Until recently it was difficult to incorporate team projects in distance education. Nowadays, however, new technology is available which allows for distance teamwork. In this paper we will describe a project-oriented course on human-computer interaction. The course is meant for computer science students in distance education. A serious restriction is caused by the fact that the students study at home, where they usually only have a slow connection to Internet at their disposal. We will focus on the way we structured the course to make distance teamwork possible. Furthermore the tools we offered the students will be discussed. Finally, in the paper we will present the first experiences gained in a pilot project with 12 computer science students.

Designing usable systems is difficult and designers need effective tools that are usable themselves. Effective design tools should be based on proven knowledge of design. Capturing knowledge about the successful design of usable systems is important for both novice and experienced designers and traditionally, this knowledge has largely been described in guidelines. However, guidelines have shown to have problems concerning selection, validity and applicability. Patterns have emerged as a possible solution to some of the problems from which guidelines suffer. Patterns focus on the context of a problem and solution thereby guiding the designer in using the design knowledge. Patterns for architecture or software engineering are not identical in structure and user interface design also requires its own structure for patterns, focusing on usability. This paper explores how patterns for user interface design must be structured in order to be effective and usable tools for designers. A structure for user interface design patterns is proposed and is illustrated with an example.

This full-day tutorial introduces a seamless development approach for user interface generation, based on the user-centered Groupware Task Analysis GTA, and the task-based design technique and tool TADEUS (Task Analysis / Design / End User Systems). The seamless procedure ensures (i) for the developers consistency and semantic richness throughout analysis and design, and (ii) for end users context-sensitive and immediate feedback of analysis and design inputs through prototyping from analysis/design representations. The tutorial is held in participatory style and introduces the background, goals, experiences, methodology to be followed, methods and tools to use. It also provides hand-on experiences with existing tools to be used along the lines of development. The methodology will be explained and experienced along one or more projects the participants will identify and specify according to their interest and profile.

Usability has gained a lot of attention in the design community and it is one of main goals of every design project. Evaluating usability is usually done with end-users after a prototype has been built and there are not many techniques available that allow usability evaluation during the early design phases. Current dialog modeling techniques generally do not deal with usability aspects, as they are often functional based models, dealing only with states and state changes. This paper investigates how usability aspects can be incorporated into dialog models so that usability can be evaluated during the design process without doing usage tests. A set of measurable properties is given which together could give an indication about the usability of the design, This way, some usability aspects can be covered early in the design process without the need for an executable prototype or end-users.

Given that communication network bandwidth remains at a premium, the design of multiparty mediated systems is a problem of conveying the least redundant information first. We investigated the redundancy of gaze direction in relation to typical full-motion visual cues in performing a triadic abstract office communication task. The results of the experiment indicate that the use of still-video does not necessarily have a negative impact on task performance. Gaze directional cues may provide extra regulative information, but with regard to task performance in small, well-organized groups this information seems to be largely redundant.

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the requirements and principles of groupware design. In the relatively short history of groupware design, different points of attention seem to be prevalent. Many design and implementation examples are technology driven, trying to optimize the use of available networking and multi- media technology and combining more or less traditional communication media, such as video, telephone, and data networking. Conventional design methods for systems engineering, including human computer interaction (HCI) approaches, structure design activities into a series of design phases that are ordered in time because of the dependence of decisions taken in each phase on decisions in earlier phases. In most common groupware design approaches, the activity of deriving design requirements is not explicitly indicated. The traditional aspects of the user interface in this respect are taken for granted, but the unique aspect of functional requirements for cooperative work, coordination, and communication are often hidden in the activities of design and social or ethnographic analysis. With increasing technological opportunities provided by multi-media and network connections, choices have to be made about the criteria for the typical groupware functionality to be designed and implemented in actual systems.

Information Technology is a special kind of artifact, in relation to its use by human users. IT systems and IT applications are characterised by a very complex structure, even if we restrict our focus to those parts of IT that an “end user” needs to understand in using it. At the same time the very nature of IT prohibits direct observation of the complexity of the processes and data structures that are relevant for the user. Consequently, users need to construct their own mental representations of the underlying complexity, in order to plan their use, to execute task delegation, and to interpret the actions of the system.

Users of a computer application need a clear and consistent structure of knowledge of the system with which they interact. This knowledge only concerns that part of the machine that is directly relevant to the delegation of tasks by the user to the system, the virtual machine or user interface. The cognitive ergonomic approach that will be illustrated combines methods for the representation of the user interface or virtual machine, with the concept of mental model. Our basic ideas are: 1. The mental model is an important aspect of human-computer interaction (Norman, 1983) 2. Specifying the virtual machine means defining explicitly the conceptual model for the user interface in a knowledge based way 3. The conceptual model can be described using a multilevel approach derived from Moran (1981), which should also apply to the user’s mental model 4. This conceptual model should be presented to the user, taking into account relevant characteristics of human learning and user variables These ideas will be illustrated in a field study of managers who had to learn the basic principles of an office system.