Toward overcoming culture, skill and situation hurdles in Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

This paper proposes a new effective strategy for designing and implementing interactive systems overcoming culture, skill and situation hurdles in HumanComputer Interaction (HCI). The strategy to identify and reduce these hurdles is developed in the framework of a methodology based on a recently introduced model of HCI, and exploits the technological innovations of XML (Extensible Markup Language). HCI is modelled as a cyclic process in which the user and the interactive system communicate by materializing and interpreting a sequence of messages. The interaction process is formalized by specifying both the physical message appearance and the computational aspect of the interaction. This formalization allows the adoption of notation traditionally adopted by users in their workplaces as the starting point of the interactive system design. In this way, the humansystem interaction language takes into account the users' culture. Moreover, the methodology permits user representatives to build a hierarchy of systems progressively adapted to users' situations, skills and habits, according to the work organization in the domain considered. The strategy is proved to be effective by describing how to implement it using BANCO (Browsing Adaptive Network for Changing user Operativity), a feasibility prototype based on XML, which allows the hierarchy implementation and system adaptations. Several examples from an environmental case under study are used throughout the paper to illustrate the methodology and the effectiveness of the technology adopted.

Supporting interaction and co-evolution of users and systems

“…The feasibility of the SSW approach has also been demonstrated in mechanical engineering [9] and geology [7] domains. The adoption of the SSW approach in such domains results in much less effort in system maintenance and in greater user satisfaction.…”

“…Even though this model is presented here for the first time, it was implicitly used to develop a design methodology to create flexible and tailorable interactive systems. User studies in real cases in the medical domain [11], the mechanical domain [9] and the geological domain [7], have highlighted the needs of end users and their difficulties with current technologies. From this, we have derived the main ideas of our design methodology and a better understanding of the interaction and co-evolution processes that are formalized in the proposed model.…”

Automatic Generation of Textual Summaries from Neonatal Intensive Care Data

“…This kind of document organisation could extend the notion of an e-document [10] in which multimedia information is structured according to user annotations. Another example of interaction is given by the KNAVE-II system [52] which enables users to query patient databases to retrieve raw and abstracted low frequency data and display this on the screen for more accurate decision making in the oncology domain.…”

BANCO: An SVG-based approach to create Web sites for the management of remote sensing, spatial and non-spatial data

“…BANCO has been designed to explore how to support users in their interaction with data from Web servers, while maintaining their independence (Carrara et al 2001(Carrara et al , 2002. To this aim BANCO takes into account two sets of requirements.…”