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Whilst new patents and announcements advertise the technical availability of foldable displays, which are capable to be folded to some extent, there is still a lack of fundamental and applied understanding of how to model, to design, and to prototype graphical user interfaces for these devices before actually implementing them. Without waiting for their off-the-shelf availability and without being tied to any physical foldable mechanism, Flecto defines a model, an associated notation, and a supporting software for prototyping graphical user interfaces running on foldable displays, such as foldable smartphone or assemblies of foldable surfaces. For this purpose, we use an extended notation of the Yoshizawa-Randlett diagramming system, used to describe the folds of origami models, to characterize a foldable display and define possible interactive actions based on its folding operations. A guiding method for rapidly prototyping foldable user interfaces is devised and supported by Flecto, a design environment where foldable user interfaces are simulated in 3D environment instead of in physical reality. We report on a case study to demonstrate Flecto in action and we gather the feedback from users on Flecto, using Microsoft Product Reaction Cards.

This paper presents DXR, a toolkit for building immersive data visualizations based on the Unity development platform. Over the past years, immersive data visualizations in augmented and virtual reality (AR, VR) have been emerging as a promising medium for data sense-making beyond the desktop. However, creating immersive visualizations remains challenging, and often require complex low-level programming and tedious manual encoding of data attributes to geometric and visual properties. These can hinder the iterative idea-to-prototype process, especially for developers without experience in 3D graphics, AR, and VR programming. With DXR, developers can efficiently specify visualization designs using a concise declarative visualization grammar inspired by Vega-Lite. DXR further provides a GUI for easy and quick edits and previews of visualization designs in-situ, i.e., while immersed in the virtual world. DXR also provides reusable templates and customizable graphical marks, enabling unique and engaging visualizations. We demonstrate the flexibility of DXR through several examples spanning a wide range of applications.

International audience; Graphic Design Software Applications radically transformed the practice and the industry of graphic design. However, they barely evolved since their introduction, leading designers to question their ubiquity. In this paper, we explore this mismatch by analysing digital design tools through two lenses. We first investigate digital design tools from a "lineage" perspective: how they reproduced the pre-existing design tools and practices. We then use two familiar examples: the colour picker and the alignment and distribution commands to explore the vision of design that they promote. We reveal how these tools assume that designers already have in mind a desired outcome and thus introduce a mismatch with current designers' practices. To bridge this gap, we propose "graphical substrates", interactive and visual tools that combine the strengths of both programming and graphical user interfaces. We analyse how several recent research design tools embed this approach and we propose two principles: tweaking and creation from example to foster their adoption by designers.

Computer applications for diagnostic medical imaging provide generally a wide range of tools to support physicians in their daily diagnosis activities. Unfortunately, some functionalities are specialized for specific diseases or imaging modalities, while other ones are useless for the images under investigation. Nevertheless, the corresponding Graphical User Interface (GUI) widgets are still present on the screen reducing the image visualization area. As a consequence, the physician may be affected by cognitive overload and visual stress causing a degradation of performances, mainly due to unuseful widgets. In clinical environments, a GUI must represent a sequence of steps for image investigation following a well-defined workflow. This paper proposes a software framework aimed at addressing the issues outlined before. Specifically, we designed a DICOM based mechanism of data-driven GUI generation, referring to the examined body part and imaging modality as well as to the medical image analysis task to perform. In this way, the self-configuring GUI is generated on-the-fly, so that just specific functionalities are active according to the current clinical scenario. Such a solution provides also a tight integration with the DICOM standard, which considers various aspects of the technology in medicine but does not address GUI specification issues. The proposed workflow is designed for diagnostic workstations with a local file system on an interchange media acting inside or outside the hospital ward. Accordingly, the DICOMDIR conceptual data model, defined by a hierarchical structure, is exploited and extended to include the GUI information thanks to a new Information Object Module (IOM), which reuses the DICOM information model. The proposed framework exploits the DICOM standard representing an enabling technology for an auto-consistent solution in medical diagnostic applications. In this paper we present a detailed description of the framework, its software design, and a proof-of-concept implementation as a suitable plug-in of the OsiriX imaging software.

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10209-011-0245-9, This work presents a hybrid approach to sign language synthesis. This approach allows the hand-tuning of the phonetic description of the signs, which focuses on the time aspect of the sign. Therefore, the approach retains the capacity for the performing of morpho-phonological operations, like notation-based approaches, and improves the synthetic signing performance, such as the hand-tuned animations approach. The proposed approach simplifies the input message description using a new high-level notation and storage of sign phonetic descriptions in a relational database. Such relational database allows for more flexible sign phonetic descriptions; it also allows for a description of sign timing and the synchronization between sign phonemes. The new notation, named HLSML, is a gloss-based notation focusing on message description in it. HLSML introduces several tags that allow for the modification of the signs in the message that defines dialect and mood variations, both of which are defined in the relational database, and message timing, including transition durations and pauses. A new avatar design is also proposed that simplifies the development of the synthesizer and avoids any interference with the independence of the sign language phonemes during animation. The obtained results showed an increase of the sign recognition rate compared to other approaches. This improvement was based on the active role that the sign language experts had in the description of signs, which was the result of the flexibility of the sign storage approach. The approach will simplify the description of synthesizable signed messages, thus facilitating the creation of multimedia-signed contents.

Despite all the effort dedicated to bringing better User-Centered Design (UCD) tools to market, current studies show that the industry is still dominated by tools that do not support the activities and workstyles of designers. Also, there is a growing need for interaction design tools aimed at software engineers, a problem related to bringing usability into the software engineering processes. We propose a new workstyle model that can be effectively used to envision, design and evaluate a new generation of innovative interaction and software design tools, aimed at integrating usability and software engineering. We illustrate the effectiveness of our model by describing a new tool, called CanonSketch, that was built in order to support UCD in terms of the dimensions in our workstyle model. We also describe an evaluation study aimed at contrasting paper prototyping with our tool as well as the level of workstyle support.

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are critical for the security, safety and reliability of software systems. Injection attacks, for instance via SQL, succeed due to insufficient input validation and can be avoided if contract-based approaches, such as Design by Contract, are followed in the software development lifecycle of GUIs. This paper proposes a model-based testing approach for detecting GUI data contract violations, which may result in serious failures such as system crash. A contract-based model of GUI data specifications is used to develop test scenarios and to serve as test oracle. The technique introduced uses multi terminal binary decision diagrams, which are designed as an integral part of decision tableaugmented event sequence graphs, to implement a GUI testing process. A case study, which validates the presented approach on a port scanner written in Java programming language, is presented. Copyright © 2015 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.

The effort and expertise required for manually crafting the models for model-based testing (MBT) is a major obstacle slowing down its industrial adoption. For implemented and executable systems, there are approaches to automate some part or even the whole process of creating the models for MBT. Recently, using extracted models for testing graphical user interface (GUI) applications has been a popular area of research, but most of the proposed approaches have limitations and restrictions on what can be modeled, and the software industry has not adopted these approaches. In this paper, we try to identify the gaps between the academic approaches and tools and industrial requirements hindering the industrial adoption, and try to suggest practical solutions to the identified gaps.

This paper presents a catalog of smells in the context of interactive applications. These so-called usability smells are indicators of poor design on an application's user interface, with the potential to hinder not only its usability but also its maintenance and evolution. To eliminate such usability smells we discuss a set of program/usability refactorings. In order to validate the presented usability smells catalog, and the associated refactorings, we present a preliminary empirical study with software developers in the context of a real open source hospital management application. Moreover, a tool that computes graphical user interface behavior models, giving the applications' source code, is used to automatically detect usability smells at the model level., This work was partially funded by the ERDF - European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), within projects reference FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-020484 (J. Saraiva) and FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-020554 (J. C. Campos).

In the past decade, networked virtual environments (NVEs) have been an increasingly active area of research, with the first commercial systems emerging recently. Graphical and behavioral representation of users within such systems is a particularly important issue that has lagged in development behind other issues such as network architectures and space structuring. In this paper, we expose the importance of using virtual humans within these systems and provide a brief overview of several virtual humans technologies used in particular for simulation of crowds. As the main technical contribution, the paper presents the integration of these technologies with the COVEN-DIVE platform, the extension of the DIVE system developed within the COVEN project. In conjunction with this, we present our contributions through the COVEN project to the MPEG-4 standard concerning the representation of virtual humans.

In recent years, the evolution of 3D graphics hardware and software has lead to a growing interest for serious games in three-dimensional virtual environments for learning, training, and rehabilitation. Many of these games are based on a first-person-shooter paradigm in which users navigate through the environment, select, and manipulate virtual objects. The target users of these applications are not necessarily usual gamers, and they often have difficulties in navigating and interacting in the 3D environment. This paper proposes the wise cursor, a new method for selection that improves the usability and accessibility of mouse-driven serious games in 3D environments. At each user click, the proposed method computes a list of objects candidates to be selected and their probability of being the desired one. Depending on the uncertainty of the probability distribution, either one object is selected or a mechanism to clarify the selection is proposed. In the former case, if the selected object is within the user avatar’s scope, the action associated to it is realized, otherwise the application automatically navigates toward it. In this way, selection and navigation are eased. The empirical results of the usability tests show that this technique is fast, practical, and that it requires little user’s skills. Thus, it can make serious games usable for a wider range of users who can concentrate on the training objectives without technological barriers.

Electronically connecting medical experts with patients permits remote care delivery from diagnostics to surgery. Traditional visual computing tasks such as volume rendering or image processing may also become more available when electronically local. Recent innovations in media processing and client-server technology will help process both video and graphics in real time and enable an electronically local environment for healthcare.

Pictograms and icons that are not easily recognised by the users run the risk of being under-used or even superfluous. Well-designed pictograms allow the user to recognise the represented functions of a device (e.g. of a computer interface) without the need of extra instruction. It is argued that it is imperative that pictograms be empirically tested in order to establish whether the user does indeed associate the appropriate referent. A number of pictogram evaluation methods are available with some of them being restricted to certain applications only and others having considerable methodological drawbacks. The Multiple Index Approach for the evaluation of pictograms is presented which has been developed by the Technical Committee Human Factors of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). It focuses on both correct associations and errors and takes into account aesthetic as well as performance parameters.

Advancing the brain-computer interface (BCI) towards practical applications in technology-based assistive solutions for people with disabilities requires coping with problems of accessibility and usability to increase user acceptance and satisfaction. The main objective of this study was to introduce a usability-oriented approach in the assessment of BCI technology development by focusing on evaluation of the user's subjective workload and satisfaction. The secondary aim was to compare two applications for a P300-based BCI. Eight healthy subjects were asked to use an assistive technology solution which integrates the P300-based BCI with commercially available software under two conditions--visual stimuli needed to evoke the P300 response were either overlaid onto the application's graphical user interface or presented on a separate screen. The two conditions were compared for effectiveness (level of performance), efficiency (subjective workload measured by means of NASA-TXL) and satisfaction of the user. Although no significant difference in usability could be detected between the two conditions, the methodology proved to be an effective tool to highlight weaknesses in the technical solution.