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Concerns about representation in computing within the U.S. have driven numerous activities to broaden participation. Assessment of the impact of these efforts and, indeed, a clear assessment of the actual "problem" being addressed are limited by the nature of the most common data analysis which looks at the representation of each population as a percentage of the number of students graduating with a degree in computing. This use of a single metric cannot adequately assess the impact of broadening participation efforts. First, this approach fails to account for changing demographics of the undergraduate population in terms of overall numbers and relative proportion of the Federally designated gender, race, and ethnicity groupings. A second issue is that the majority of literature on broadening participation in computing (BPC) reports data on gender or on race/ethnicity, omitting data on students' intersectional identities. This leads to an incorrect understanding of both the data and the challenges we face as a field. In this paper we present several different approaches to tracking the impact of BPC efforts. We make three recommendations: 1) cohort-based analysis should be used to accurately show student engagement in computing; 2) the field as a whole needs to adopt the norm of always reporting intersectional data; 3) university demographic context matters when looking at how well a CS department is doing to broaden participation in computing, including longitudinal analysis of university demographic shifts that impact the local demographics of computing., Comment: Accepted for publication in Communications of the ACM, late summer or Fall 2024

Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of the activities a person performs in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, use, and distribute information in each of its many forms (paper and digital, in e-mails, files, Web pages, text messages, tweets, posts, etc.) as needed to meet life's many goals (everyday and long-term, work-related and not) and to fulfill life's many roles and responsibilities (as parent, spouse, friend, employee, member of community, etc.). PIM activities are an effort to establish, use, and maintain a mapping between information and need. Activities of finding (and re-finding) move from a current need toward information while activities of keeping move from encountered information toward anticipated need. Meta-level activities such as maintaining, organizing, and managing the flow of information focus on the mapping itself. Tools and techniques of PIM can promote information integration with benefits for each kind of PIM activity and across the life cycle of personal information. Understanding how best to accomplish this integration without inadvertently creating problems along the way is a key challenge of PIM., Comment: Final version available at https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.1081/E-ELIS4-120053695

In computer science, students could benefit from more opportunities to learn important, high-level concepts and to improve their learning skills. Peer review is one method to encourage this by providing students with the opportunity to evaluate other people's work and to receive feedback on their own projects. This allows for rich learning experience but it is not immediately obvious how to create a programming project review that will improve the students' conceptual understanding, require higher level thinking, and be engaging. The current literature does not typically address differences between review implementations or provide reasons for design decisions. This work explored how two different types of reviews affected the students' learning of concepts, high-level thinking, and engagement. There were indications that the type of review affected how well students addressed the concept they were reviewing and the comments' length. This shows that the review's type may affect student engagement and conceptual learning. There were also differences in how they reviewed the concepts of Abstraction, Decomposition, and Encapsulation, suggesting that the concepts are being learned in different ways. Both of these results have an impact on the use of peer review computer science but need further investigation., Comment: 69 pages

In this paper, we report on findings from an ethnographic study of how people use their calendars for personal information management (PIM). Our participants were faculty, staff and students who were not required to use or contribute to any specific calendaring solution, but chose to do so anyway. The study was conducted in three parts: first, an initial survey provided broad insights into how calendars were used; second, this was followed up with personal interviews of a few participants which were transcribed and content-analyzed; and third, examples of calendar artifacts were collected to inform our analysis. Findings from our study include the use of multiple reminder alarms, the reliance on paper calendars even among regular users of electronic calendars, and wide use of calendars for reporting and life-archival purposes. We conclude the paper with a discussion of what these imply for designers of interactive calendar systems and future work in PIM research.

As users begin to use many more devices for personal information management (PIM) than just the traditional desktop computer, it is essential for HCI researchers to understand how these devices are being used in the wild and their roles in users' information environments. We conducted a study of 220 knowledge workers about their devices, the activities they performed on each, and the groups of devices used together. Our findings indicate that several devices are often used in groups; integrated multi-function portable devices have begun to replace single-function devices for communication (e.g. email and IM). Users use certain features opportunistically because they happen to be carrying a multi-function device with them. The use of multiple devices and multi-function devices is fraught with compromises as users must choose and make trade-offs among various factors.

Pre-Requirement Specification traceability is the activity of capturing relations between requirements and their sources, in particular user needs. Requirements are formal technical specifications in the solution space; needs are natural language expressions codifying user expectations in the problem space. Current traceability techniques are challenged by the complexity gap that results from the disparity between the spaces, and thereby, often neglect traceability to and from requirements. We identify the existence of an intermediary region -- the transition space -- which structures the progression from needs to requirements. More specifically, our approach to developing change-tolerant systems, termed Capabilities Engineering, identifies highly cohesive, minimally coupled, optimized functional abstractions called Capabilities in the transition space. These Capabilities link the problem and solution spaces through directives (entities derived from user needs). Directives connect the problem and transition spaces; Capabilities link the transition and solution spaces. Furthermore, the process of Capabilities Engineering addresses specific traceability challenges. It supports the evolution of traces, provides semantic and structural information about dependencies, incorporates human factors, generates traceability relations with negligible overhead, and thereby, fosters pre-Requirement Specification traceability., Comment: This paper appears in International Symposium on Grand Challenges in Traceability, TEFSE/GCT 2007. 10 pages, 7 Figures

Today, people use multiple devices to fulfill their information needs. However, designers design each device individually, without accounting for the other devices that users may also use. In many cases, the applications on all these devices are designed to be functional replicates of each other. We argue that this results in an over-reliance on data synchronization across devices, version control nightmares, and increased burden of file management. In this paper, we present the idea of a \textit{personal information ecosystem}, an analogy to biological ecosystems, which allows us to discuss the inter-relationships among these devices to fulfill the information needs of the user. There is a need for designers to design devices as part of a complete ecosystem, not as independent devices that simply share data replicated across them. To help us understand this domain and to facilitate the dialogue and study of such systems, we present the terminology, classifications of the interdependencies among different devices, and resulting implications for design.

This paper presents our evaluation of using a Tablet-PC to provide peer-review comments in the first year Computer Science course. Our exploration consisted of an evaluation of how students write comments on other students' assignments using three different methods: pen and paper, a Tablet-PC, and a desktop computer. Our ultimate goal is to explore the effect that interface style (Tablet vs. Desktop) has on the quality and quantity of the comments provided., Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is commonly used in introductory Computer Science to teach basic object-oriented design. However, there appears to be a lack of suitable software to support this task. Many of the available programs that support UML focus on developing code and not on enhancing learning. Those that were designed for educational use sometimes have poor interfaces or are missing common and important features, such as multiple selection and undo/redo. There is a need for software that is tailored to an instructional environment and has all the useful and needed functionality for that specific task. This is the purpose of minimUML. minimUML provides a minimum amount of UML, just what is commonly used in beginning programming classes, while providing a simple, usable interface. In particular, minimUML was designed to support abstract design while supplying features for exploratory learning and error avoidance. In addition, it allows for the annotation of diagrams, through text or freeform drawings, so students can receive feedback on their work. minimUML was developed with the goal of supporting ease of use, supporting novice students, and a requirement of no prior-training for its use., Comment: 38 pages, 15 figures

The global audience for software products includes members of different countries, religions, and cultures: people who speak different languages, have different life styles, and have different perceptions and expectations of any given product. A major impediment in interface development is that there is inadequate empirical evidence for the effects of culture in the usability engineering methods used for developing user interfaces. This paper presents a controlled study investigating the effects of culture on the effectiveness of structured interviews in usability testing. The experiment consisted of usability testing of a website with two independent groups of Indian participants by two interviewers; one belonging to the Indian culture and the other to the Anglo-American culture. Participants found more usability problems and made more suggestions to an interviewer who was a member of the same (Indian) culture than to the foreign (Anglo-American) interviewer. The results of the study empirically establish that culture significantly affects the efficacy of structured interviews during international user testing. The implications of this work for usability engineering are discussed., Comment: 8 pages

Software engineering (SE) and usability engineering (UE), as disciplines, have reached substantial levels of maturity. Each of these two disciplines is now well represented with respect to most computer science (CS) curricula. But, the two disciplines are practiced almost independently - missing oppurtunities to collaborate, coordinate and communicate about the overall design - and thereby contributing to system failures. Today, a confluence of several ingredients contribute to these failures: the increasing importance of the user interface (UI) component in the overall system, the independent maturation of the human computer interaction area, and the lack of a cohesive process model to integrate the UI experts' UE development efforts with that of SE. This in turn, we believe, is a result of a void in computing curricula: a lack of education and training regarding the importance of communication, collaboration and coordination between the SE and UE processes. In this paper we describe the current approach to teaching SE and UE and its shortcomings. We identify and analyze the barriers and issues involved in developing systems having substantial interactive components. We then propose four major themes of learning for a comprehensive computing curriculum integrating SE, UE, and system architectures in a project environment.

In this position paper we propose a process model that provides a development infrastructure in which the usability engineering and software engineering life cycles co-exist in complementary roles. We describe the motivation, hurdles, rationale, arguments, and implementation plan for the need, specification, and the usefulness of such a model., Comment: This document contains 8 pages with 5 figures. This appeared in Bridging the SE & HCI Communities Workshop in INTERACT 2003 (http://www.se-hci.org/bridging/interact)

Mobile access to information is a considerable problem for many users, especially to information found on the Web. In this paper, we explore how a voice-controlled service, accessible by telephone, could support mobile users' needs for refinding specific information previously found on the Web. We outline challenges in creating such a service and describe architectural and user interfaces issues discovered in an exploratory prototype we built called WebContext. We also present the results of a study, motivated by our experience with WebContext, to explore what people remember about information that they are trying to refind and how they express information refinding requests in a collaborative conversation. As part of the study, we examine how end-usercreated Web page annotations can be used to help support mobile information re-finding. We observed the use of URLs, page titles, and descriptions of page contents to help identify waypoints in the search process. Furthermore, we observed that the annotations were utilized extensively, indicating that explicitly added context by the user can play an important role in re-finding.

We present the first study to explore the use of out-of-turn interaction in websites. Out-of-turn interaction is a technique which empowers the user to supply unsolicited information while browsing. This approach helps flexibly bridge any mental mismatch between the user and the website, in a manner fundamentally different from faceted browsing and site-specific search tools. We built a user interface (Extempore) which accepts out-of-turn input via voice or text; and employed it in a US congressional website, to determine if users utilize out-of-turn interaction for information-finding tasks, and their rationale for doing so. The results indicate that users are adept at discerning when out-of-turn interaction is necessary in a particular task, and actively interleaved it with browsing. However, users found cascading information across information-finding subtasks challenging. Therefore, this work not only improves our understanding of out-of-turn interaction, but also suggests further opportunities to enrich browsing experiences for users., Comment: Introduces out-of-turn interaction with websites: a technique which sustains, rather than curbs, the user-system dialog

Interfaces that support multi-lingual content can reach a broader community. We wish to extend the reach of CITIDEL, a digital library for computing education materials, to support multiple languages. By doing so, we hope that it will increase the number of users, and in turn the number of resources. This paper discusses three approaches to translation (automated translation, developer-based, and community-based), and a brief evaluation of these approaches. It proposes a design for an online community translation center where volunteers help translate interface components and educational materials available in CITIDEL., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

The problem of how people find information is studied extensively; however, the problem of how people organize, re-use, and re-find information that they have found is not as well understood. Recently, several projects have conducted in-situ studies to explore how people re-find and re-use information. Here, we present results and observations from a controlled, laboratory study of refinding information found on the web. Our study was conducted as a collaborative exercise with pairs of participants. One participant acted as a retriever, helping the other participant re-find information by telephone. This design allowed us to gain insight into the strategies that users employed to re-find information, and into how domain artifacts and contextual information were used to aid the re-finding process. We also introduced the ability for users to add their own explicitly artifacts in the form of making annotations on the web pages they viewed. We observe that re-finding often occurs as a two stage, iterative process in which users first attempt to locate an information source (search), and once found, begin a process to find the specific information being sought (browse). Our findings are consistent with research on waypoints; orienteering approaches to re-finding; and navigation of electronic spaces. Furthermore, we observed that annotations were utilized extensively, indicating that explicitly added context by the user can play an important role in re-finding.

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly important with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. This article investigates systems support for web browsing in a multimodal interface. Specifically, we outline the design and implementation of a software framework that integrates hyperlink and speech modes of interaction. Instead of viewing speech as merely an alternative interaction medium, the framework uses it to support out-of-turn interaction, providing a flexibility of information access not possible with hyperlinks alone. This approach enables the creation of websites that adapt to the needs of users, yet permits the designer fine-grained control over what interactions to support. Design methodology, implementation details, and two case studies are presented.

Web pages contain a large variety of information, but are largely designed for use by graphical web browsers. Mobile access to web-based information often requires presenting HTML web pages using channels that are limited in their graphical capabilities such as small-screens or audio-only interfaces. Content transcoding and annotations have been explored as methods for intelligently presenting HTML documents. Much of this work has focused on transcoding for small-screen devices such as are found on PDAs and cell phones. Here, we focus on the use of annotations and transcoding for presenting HTML content through a voice user interface instantiated in VoiceXML. This transcoded voice interface is designed with an assumption that it will not be used for extended web browsing by voice, but rather to quickly gain directed access to information on web pages. We have found repeated structures that are common in the presentation of data on web pages that are well suited for voice presentation and navigation. In this paper, we describe these structures and their use in an annotation system we have implemented that produces a VoiceXML interface to information originally embedded in HTML documents. We describe the transcoding process used to translate HTML into VoiceXML, including transcoding features we have designed to lead to highly usable VoiceXML code., Comment: 8 pages

There has been a widespread emergence of computing devices in the past few years that go beyond the capabilities of traditional desktop computers. These devices have varying input/output characteristics, modalities and interaction mechanisms. However, users want to use the same kinds of applications and access the same data and information on these appliances that they can access on their desktop computers. The user interfaces for these devices and platforms go beyond the traditional interaction metaphors. It is a challenge to build User Interfaces (UIs) for these devices of differing capabilities that allow the end users to perform the same kinds of tasks. The User Interface Markup Language (UIML) is an XML-based language that allows the canonical description of UIs for different platforms. We present a multi-step transformation-based framework for building Multi-Platform User Interfaces using UIML. We describe the language features of UIML that facilitate the development of multi-platform UIs, the multi-step process involved in our framework and the transformations needed to build the UIs., Comment: 11 pages

There has been a widespread emergence of computing devices in the past few years that go beyond the capabilities of traditional desktop computers. However, users want to use the same kinds of applications and access the same data and information on these appliances that they can access on their desktop computers. The user interfaces for these platforms go beyond the traditional interaction metaphors. It is a challenge to build User Interfaces (UIs) for these devices of differing capabilities that allow the end users to perform the same kinds of tasks. The User Interface Markup Language (UIML) is an XML-based language that allows the canonical description of UIs for different platforms. We describe the language features of UIML that facilitate the development of multi-platform UIs. We also describe the key aspects of our approach that makes UIML succeed where previous approaches failed, namely the division in the representation of a UI, the use of a generic vocabulary, and an integrated development environment specifically designed for transformation-based UI development. Finally we describe the initial details of a multi-step usability engineering process for building multi-platform UI using UIML., Comment: 12 pages

We show that partial evaluation can be usefully viewed as a programming model for realizing mixed-initiative functionality in interactive applications. Mixed-initiative interaction between two participants is one where the parties can take turns at any time to change and steer the flow of interaction. We concentrate on the facet of mixed-initiative referred to as `unsolicited reporting' and demonstrate how out-of-turn interactions by users can be modeled by `jumping ahead' to nested dialogs (via partial evaluation). Our approach permits the view of dialog management systems in terms of their native support for staging and simplifying interactions; we characterize three different voice-based interaction technologies using this viewpoint. In particular, we show that the built-in form interpretation algorithm (FIA) in the VoiceXML dialog management architecture is actually a (well disguised) combination of an interpreter and a partial evaluator.