Human-Spreadsheet Interaction

Kohlhase, Andrea

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-40498-6_47

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Despite the ease of spreadsheets and familiarity of end-users with spreadsheet logic and actions, storing and representing large amount of facility data in a tabular form with number of dependent sub-sections may have unintended effects and challenges in handling and interpreting COBie data, such as challenges in visualizing the overall content, duplication of data entries (during manual input), challenges in understanding data dependencies within and between the workbooks, memory overload due to high amount of numerical and text-based data, etc. Such issues have been noted in the literature about the usability and cognitive aspects of spreadsheets in general (Chen and Chan, 2008;Hendry and Green, 1994;Kohlhase, 2013;Thorne and Ball, 2008). Therefore, even though the cross dependencies between workbooks are accessible as drop-down pick-lists in the COBie spreadsheet, the main difficulty that end-users have in understanding the data in the multiple workbooks of COBie spreadsheet can be summarized as the high amount of data, and the lack of explicit dependencies between the cells and multiple workbooks.…”

Section: Representation and Publication Of Cobie Datamentioning

confidence: 89%

Exploring the use of Gestalt’s principles in improving the visualization, user experience and comprehension of COBie data extension

Yalcinkaya¹,

Singh²

2019

ECAM

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Purpose Until now, the usage and usability factors associated with AEC–FM standards have remained largely overlooked. This oversight could be a potentially significant factor in the adoption rates as well as effective utilization of such advanced solutions in the AEC–FM industry. Therefore, from a conceptual and theoretical viewpoint, the purpose of this paper is to address this gap in understanding and enhancing the usability aspects of standards such as construction operations building information exchange (COBie) over its spreadsheet representation. Besides, findings from this study and the proposed theoretical fundamentals to enhance the usability and functionality of COBie spreadsheet representation could potentially lay the foundation for a VisualCOBie approach. Design/methodology/approach The iterative steps of design thinking and agile development are harmonized to form the main research methodology. Design thinking is useful in problem (re)formulation, and agile development is useful in iterative software development. The approach aims to identify and understand the needs and requirements of the AEC–FM users from the standardized approaches and associated IT solutions; and formulate the main features and functionalities of the proposed solution. The methodology supports the aim of generating a broad range of possible solutions instead of coming up with the “right” solution. Findings Despite the standards and associated IT developments, the AEC–FM industry still suffers from inefficient information management. To date, most initiatives have focused on utilization of the outputs from different IT solutions in terms of accuracy and completeness of the data defined in the standards. This research found that well-established standards such as COBie and corresponding IT solutions are not merely technical issues, but it is equally important to understand how the end-users cognitively perceive and process them. The developed solutions need to address user point of view to facilitate wider utilization of these standards in practice. Research limitations/implications In this research, Gestalt’s visual perception principles have been used to evaluate the usability issues of COBie spreadsheet. Although Gestalt principles provide a valid and proven viewpoint, there can be other cognitive principles that could also be taken into consideration. Originality/value The usage and usability factors associated with AEC–FM standards have remained largely overlooked, indicating a gap in the literature. This gap was considered as a potentially significant factor in the adoption as well as effective utilization of such standards and advanced solutions in the AEC–FM industry. By grounding the research in cognitive and usability perspectives of information exchange standards, the authors demonstrate how such theoretical underpinning can lead to innovative solutions.

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Section: Representation and Publication Of Cobie Datamentioning

confidence: 89%

Exploring the use of Gestalt’s principles in improving the visualization, user experience and comprehension of COBie data extension

Yalcinkaya¹,

Singh²

2019

ECAM

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“…Spreadsheets have a tabular layout at the surface level, while the connection of the cells and dependencies is established in the deep level (Saariluoma and Sajaniemi, 1989). As a result, it is difficult for the user interacting with the tabular layer to establish the connections among the data distributed in cells and workbooks (Kohlhase, 2013). Users often have to use cognitively demanding visual checks to deduce the semantic connection among the cells, columns and workbooks (Hendry and Green, 1994).…”

Section: Research Approach and Methodologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, because of the large amount of facility data presented in tabular formats across many worksheets in COBie spreadsheet, there are usability challenges such as, visualizing the overall content, duplication of data entries (during manual input), understanding data dependencies within and between the workbooks and memory overload because of high amount of numerical and text-based data (Aalto BIM Collaboration, 2013). Many of these usability issues are also associated with cognitive aspects of large spreadsheets in general (Chen and Chan, 2000;Hendry and Green, 1994;Kohlhase, 2013;Thorne and Ball, 2008). In addition to these generic issues, there are challenges with COBie in terms of the understanding of the data structure, as well as the links with the 2D/3D models associated with the data (Yalcinkaya et al, 2016).…”

Section: Visualcobie For Facilities Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

VisualCOBie for facilities management

Yalcinkaya

Singh

2019

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to describe the technical features, underlying concepts and implementation details of a novel Building Information Modeling (BIM)-integrated, graph-based platform developed to support BIM for facilities management through a usability driven visual representation of the construction operations building information exchange (COBie) spreadsheet data. Design/methodology/approach This paper is based on the iterative steps of design thinking and agile software development methodology. The conceptual development of the VisualCOBie platform is based on Gestalt’s principles of visual perception to facilitate usability and comprehension of the COBie data. Findings The paper demonstrates that Gestalt’s principles of visual perception provide a suitable conceptual as well as implementable basis for improving the usability and comprehension of COBie spreadsheets. The implemented BIM-integrated, graph-based VisualCOBie platform supports visual navigation and dynamic search, reducing the cognitive load of large spreadsheets that are common in facilities management software. Research limitations/implications The usability, visual search and dependencies-based search of VisualCOBie can potentially transform how we implement and use facilities and information management systems in construction, where large spreadsheets are frequently used in conjunction with BIM and other tools. VisualCOBie also provides usability-based step towards BIM for facilities management. Originality/value The VisualCOBie approach provides a novel user interface and information management platform. This paper may also foster a potential paradigm shift in our approach to the representation and use of information exchange standards such as COBie, which are required to facilitate the research and practice on BIM for facilities management.

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“…It has been used as a usability/user experience method to research users' personal constructs when interacting with software artifacts (see [5,6,24] for examples). RGI has the advantage that it can deliver valuable insights into the perception of users even with relative low numbers of study subjects (seeo [12] for more details).…”

Section: The Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Search Interfaces for Mathematicians

Kohlhase

2014

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Access to mathematical knowledge has changed dramatically in recent years, therefore changing mathematical search practices. Our aim with this study is to scrutinize professional mathematicians' search behavior. With this understanding we want to be able to reason why mathematicians use which tool for what search problem in what phase of the search process. To gain these insights we conducted 24 repertory grid interviews with mathematically inclined people (ranging from senior professional mathematicians to non-mathematicians). From the interview data we elicited patterns for the user group "mathematicians" that can be applied when understanding design issues or creating new designs for mathematical search interfaces.

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Human-Spreadsheet Interaction

Cited by 8 publications

References 14 publications

Exploring the use of Gestalt’s principles in improving the visualization, user experience and comprehension of COBie data extension

Exploring the use of Gestalt’s principles in improving the visualization, user experience and comprehension of COBie data extension

VisualCOBie for facilities management

Search Interfaces for Mathematicians

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