1,721,008 research outputs found
Applying User-Centered Design to Flexible Hypermedia
No full textThe design of information systems is more and more user-centered: end-users are involved from the very beginning. Early involvement of users compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. The paper emphasizes the methodology used for collecting user requirements, and shows how the findings were translated into design decisions. Graphical and interactive environment for developing and testing complex adaptive hypermedia are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design of adaptive hypermedia that considers the user interaction a central poin
Getting Engaged and Getting Tired: What Is in a Museum Experience
No full textThe physical experience of visiting a museum includes emotion and intellect. The way a person feels during an experience becomes an integral part of that memory. Evoking the feeling or mood at a later time may trigger details of a memory associated with it. Thus in a museum environment it is essential that personal discovering is appropriately supported providing visitors with the suitable amount of information they need, at the right time and place, and in the form that makes it the most acceptable and enjoyable. The quality of the received presentation is liable to subjective judgement. Personal taste typically overcomes objective effectiveness and can prejudice the pleasure of the visit. When designing new personal electronic guide to support museum visit, designers have to bear in mind all the known effects and be aware of others unexpected side effects. Moreover the system should monitor visitor's reactions in order to infer the effectiveness of the choices done and, if necessary, to rearrange the presentation style. This paper presents the work that is going to be done in the HIPS project to cope with the feedback-rearrangement process when emotion and involvement are directed to museum visitor
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
User-centred design of flexible hypermedia for a mobile guide: Reflections on the hyperaudio experience
Full text linkA user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors’ profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further
step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses
how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system’s behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the
developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time
Modelling and Adapting to Context
No full textOne of the hardest points in context-aware applications is deciding what reactions a system has to a certain context. In this paper, we introduce an architecture used in two context-aware museum guides. We discuss how the context is modelled and we briefly present a rule-based mechanism to trigger system actions. A rule-based system offers the flexibility required to be context-sensitive in the broadest sense since many context features can be considered and evaluated at the same time. This architecture is very flexible and easily supports a fast prototyping approach
The Environment as a Medium: Location-aware Generation for Cultural Visitors
No full textMultimedia generation for a location-aware system has to take into account the fact that moving in a physical space and seeking for information is a cognitive as well as a psycho-motor experience. The surrounding environment attracts, distracts, provides evidence, reinforces understanding, conveys information. It plays -we propose- the role of a medium, to be deliberately allocated and coordinated with the others. In this respect, multimodality plays a key role in emphasizing the prominence of this medium and in overcoming its staticity. Reference is made to two location-aware prototypes for individualised presentation of cultural sites
Developing Natural Language Resources and Applications with GEPPETTO
No full textIn the development of LE applications there are two crucial areas: architectural design and resource development. In this paper we describe the design phase, current status, and future directions of a development environment, called GEPPETTO, whose aim is to address the two issues within the same environment. The design of GEPPETTO has been carried out using a user-centered approach, to secure the satisfaction of user needs and desiderata. The final aim of the environment is very complex and expensive; to obtain short-term intermediate results we adopted an incremental approach, developing firstly the tasks we considered more urgent and critical in LE applications and postponing the development of some other tasks. Currently only the environment for linguistic resource development has been fully implemented, whereas the other parts of the system are in progress. A case study of application of the currently implemented version of GEPPETTO to a system for Information Extraction from text is also presented; such case study confirmed the usefulness of the tools already developed and provided interesting suggestions concerning what is needed during the development of LE applications)
Participatory Design for Linguistic Engineering: the Case of the GEPPETTO Development Environment
No full textCurrent tools for Linguistic Engineering (LE) do not completely fit the requirements for scale development and deployment of real applications. What seems to lack in the available tools is a comprehensive study of user needs. This is a real limitation in a field where people with very different backgrounds (from computer scientists to linguists) are involved. To avoid such a shortcoming we adopted the Participatory Design (PD) methodology, i.e. a User Centered approach that favors the definition of tools suited to the real user needs. In this paper we show how such methodology was used in the design and implementation of a development environment for LE applications
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