318 research outputs found
Weaving semiotic engineering in meta-design: A case study analysis
No full textThe work presented in this paper aims at investigating how semiotic engineering and meta-design could be combined to support the development of socio-technical environments that enable End-User Development (EUD). In particular, I investigate the relationships existing between domain experts, playing the role of end-user developers, and meta-designers, mediated by EUD environments, and between end users and end-user developers mediated by EUD products. To this end, three case studies are considered, which belong to the recent research experience in EUD of the author. The case studies are concerned with three different application domains, namely physical prototyping of social products, accumulation and sharing of territory knowledge for first aid intervention, development of e-government services for the citizens of a municipality. The analysis is carried out both on the design process, by adopting a meta-design perspective, and on the product developed in each project, according to a semiotic engineering perspective. The analysis allows to shed light on the human and technical actors involved in EUD and on their communication processes, in order to understand which kinds of interaction visual languages and social conditions should be defined to encourage a continuous user-system co-evolution. As a result, the paper finally proposes some operative indications for the design of systems enabling EUD, which capitalize on semiotic engineering and meta-design ideas. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
End-User Development in Ambient Intelligence: a User Study
No full textIn this paper we propose a novel conceptual framework for the design and continuous evolution of ambient intelligence environments. This framework is structured along three layers - physical, inference and user layer - sharing an information space of events, conditions and actions. In particular, an end-user development approach is advocated for the user layer to support rule design and development. At this stage of the research agenda, we are investigating which could be the most suitable interaction style for rule design: indeed, it should be compatible with the underlying distributed inference layer and easy to use by a community of end users (e.g. a family). To this aim, this paper presents a user study that explores end-user development tasks for a smart home and compares two well-known systems in supporting end users in these activities. The results of the study have provided some indications for the further implementation of our framework
CoPDA 2016 Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age Proceedings of the Fourth edition of the International Workshop on Cultures of Participation in the Digital Age: From "Have to" to "Want to" Participate co-located with the 9th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (NordiCHI 2016)
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Towards a New Work Practice in the Development of e-Government Applications
No full textThis paper proposes a novel approach to the development of e-government applications for citizens and public administration employees. The approach has been derived by following a methodology based on participatory action research and design science. The general goal is favoring an organization change internally to government agencies, among different agencies, and between citizens and public administration. Therefore, the paper delineates how the current work practice for e-government service development could be improved, by proposing a set of methods and tools that foster the active participation of civil servants. To show how the new work practice could take place, the creation of an example service is discussed. Positive feedbacks from real users suggest that the approach represents a promising research direction in the e-government domain
Designing Visual Interactive Systems in the e-Government Domain
No full textThis paper proposes an approach to improve the work practice currently adopted by a local municipality to create e-government services. The approach is based on meta-design and end-user development. These paradigms allow empowering domain experts, namely civil servants with competencies in government procedures, to design and develop e-government applications to be used by citizens and administrative employees. This requires, on the one hand, to pay attention on the visual interaction aspects of the tools designed to support domain experts, and, on the other hand, to create suitable mechanisms for the automatic generation of user interfaces, application logic and databases. These goals are achieved by conceiving meta-design as a participatory design activity aimed at creating meta-models of e-government applications and suitable tools exploiting such meta-models for code generation
Cultures of Participation in Community Informatics: A Case Study
No full textThis paper describes a participatory design project aimed at developing FirstAidMap, a collaborative web mapping application to be used by an Italian non-profit association for public assistance and first aid. Volunteers of this association, and specifically ambulance drivers, need to know the characteristics of the territory where the association ensures its assistance, in order to reach a given place quickly and in a safe manner. Despite the new opportunities offered by Web 2.0 technologies, paper-based maps are the only means used by volunteers to spread and share knowledge within the association, while training sessions through PowerpointTM presentations are regularly held to train novice drivers about the dangers existing in the territory and possible changes to traffic and road signals. The two design cycles carried out to develop FirstAidMap, which are described in this paper, gave the chance to observe how a culture of participation may progressively emerge in a community informatics domain and how the related issues may be addressed
Evaluating Quality in Use of Corporate Web Sites
No full textIn our prior work, we presented a novel approach to the evaluation of quality in use of corporate web sites based on an original quality model (QM-U) and a related methodology (EQ-EVAL). This article focuses on two research questions. The first one aims at investigating whether expected quality obtained through the application of EQ-EVAL methodology by employing a small panel of evaluators is a good approximation of actual quality obtained through experimentation with real users. To answer this research question, a comparative study has been carried out involving 5 evaluators and 50 real users. The second research question aims at demonstrating that the adoption of the EQ-EVAL methodology can provide useful information for web site improvement. Three original indicators, namely coherence, coverage and ranking have been defined to answer this question, and an additional study comparing the assessments of two panels of 5 and 10 evaluators, respectively, has been carried out. The results obtained in both studies are largely positive and provide a rational support for the adoption of the EQ-EVAL methodology
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