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This paper reports our ongoing work concerning the study and development of mobile applications for supporting incident reporting in cities. We provide a view at glance of incident reporting systems and the tools that we have developed so... more
This paper reports our ongoing work concerning the study and development of mobile applications for supporting incident reporting in cities. We provide a view at glance of incident reporting systems and the tools that we have developed so far in the context of the project FEDER Ubiloop. Our main goal is to explore the potential of mobile games for improving the overall user experience (UX) whilst reporting incidents which is often considered a dull and boring activity. On one hand, we want to make the task of incident reporting a nice and positive experience to users. On the other hand, we want to stimulate citizens to report incidents in their neighborhood so that the city administration would be better coverage of problems that should be taken into account to improve the quality of life in the city. More than a definitive solution, this paper identifies alternatives and discusses the challenges for the “gamification” of incident reporting systems.
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Widespread adoption of touchscreen phones among blind users seems inevitable. Blind users face significant challenges in terms of accessibility and inclusion in the smartphone environment, despite prevalence of screen-readers and... more
Widespread adoption of touchscreen phones among blind users seems inevitable. Blind users face significant challenges in terms of accessibility and inclusion in the smartphone environment, despite prevalence of screen-readers and assistive software. This can lead to a variety of security and privacy risks while using smartphones. This paper presents qualitative research findings of a user study about security and usability aspects of smartphone usage by 51 blind smartphone users of age 18 to 40 years in a metropolitan city of India. We discuss the challenges users face, their coping strategies, and key insights that could inform design for security and usability.
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Applications for learning and training have been developed and highlighted as important tools in health education. Despite the several approaches and initiatives, these tools have not been used in an integrated way. The specific skills... more
Applications for learning and training have been developed and highlighted as important tools in health education. Despite the several approaches and initiatives, these tools have not been used in an integrated way. The specific skills approached by each application, the absence of a consensus about how to integrate them in the curricula, and the necessity of evaluation tools that standardize their utilization are the main difficulties. Considering these issues, Portal of Games and Environments Management for Designing Activities in Health (Pegadas) was designed and developed as a web portal that offers the services of organizing and sequencing serious games and virtual environments and evaluating the performance of the user in these activities. This article presents the structure of Pegadas, including the proposal of an evaluation model based on learning objectives. The results indicate its potential to collaborate with human resources training from the proposal of the sequencing, ...
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Along the design process of interactive system multiple intermediate artefacts (such as user interface prototypes, task models, dialog models?) are created, tested, revised, and improved until the development team produces a full-fledged... more
Along the design process of interactive system multiple intermediate artefacts (such as user interface prototypes, task models, dialog models?) are created, tested, revised, and improved until the development team produces a full-fledged system. However, relevant information for describing the design solution and/or supporting design decisions (such as rational about the design, decisions made, recommendations, etc.) are not explicitly captured in the models/artefacts, hence the need for annotations. Many approaches argue against information duplication to increase maintainability of the artefacts. Nonetheless, annotations created on one artefact are usually relevant to other artefacts/models. So that, there is a need for tools and techniques to coordinate annotations across artefacts/models which is the contribution of the present work. In this paper, we propose a model-based approach that was conceived to handle annotations in a systematic way along the development process of inte...
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Many computing applications imply dealing with network data, for example, social networks, communications and computing networks, epidemiological networks, among others. These applications are usually based on multivariate graphs, i.e.,... more
Many computing applications imply dealing with network data, for example, social networks, communications and computing networks, epidemiological networks, among others. These applications are usually based on multivariate graphs, i.e., graphs in which nodes and edges have multiple attributes. Most of the visualization techniques described in the literature for dealing with multivariate graphs focus either on problems associated with the visualization of topology or on problems associated with the visualization of the nodes' attributes. The integration of these two components (topology and multiple attributes) in a single visualization is a challenge due to the necessity of simultaneously representing the connections and attributes, possibly generating overlapping elements. Among usual strategies to overcome this legibility problem we find filtering and aggregation, which make possible a simplified representation providing a general view with reduced size and lower density. However, this simplification may lead to a reduction of the amount of information being displayed, while in several applications the graph details still need to be represented in order to allow in-depth data analysis. In face of that, we propose ClusterVis, a visualization technique aiming at exploring nodes attributes pertaining to sub-graphs, which are either obtained from clustering algorithms or some user-defined criteria. The technique allows comparing attributes of nodes while keeping the representation of the relationships among them. The technique was implemented within a visualization framework and evaluated by potential users.
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Prototyping is one of the core activities of User-Centered Design (UCD) processes and an integral component of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Nonetheless, for many years, prototyping was synonym of paper-based mock-ups and... more
Prototyping is one of the core activities of User-Centered Design (UCD) processes and an integral component of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Nonetheless, for many years, prototyping was synonym of paper-based mock-ups and only more recently we can say that dedicated tools for supporting prototyping activities really reach the market. In this paper we propose to analyze the evolution of prototyping tools proposed by the academic community to support research activities and prototyping tools that are aimed and improve the development process of commercial user interfaces. Thus, this paper presents a review of past and current graphical user interface prototyping tools, in order to set up the state of the art in this field, observing fundamental milestones of features over time. For that, we have screened publications presented since 1988 in some of the main HCI conferences and 113 commercial tools available on the web. The results enable a brief comparison of characterist...
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In this paper, we are concerned by the configuration of authentication mechanisms and how tuning parameters values might affect at the same time the usability and the security of systems. Both usability and security are important... more
In this paper, we are concerned by the configuration of authentication mechanisms and how tuning parameters values might affect at the same time the usability and the security of systems. Both usability and security are important properties for interactive systems however, tuning the application (for example to reduce the number of trials) to favor one property (such as security) might decrease another (usability), and vice-versa. In order to investigate the dependencies between usability and security, we propose in this paper a testbed environment for supporting the comparative assessment of authentication mechanisms. The tool presented in this paper allows varying parameters of authentication mechanisms to settle multiple configurations. It integrates a log mechanism for precisely recording the users' interactions. The current implementation features a mobile application that embeds three authentications mechanism, namely: PIN code, Android Pattern Lock and Passface. Nonethele...
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This paper investigate the role played by annotation along the development process of interactive systems. Empirical observations have demonstrated that development teams often make an extensive use of annotations, mainly as a... more
This paper investigate the role played by annotation along the development process of interactive systems. Empirical observations have demonstrated that development teams often make an extensive use of annotations, mainly as a communication support. Whilst the use of annotation is a fact (also supported by many prototyping environment, IDE and model editors), very few studies have investigated the use of the annotations for building interactive systems. In this paper, we propose a process to explain this co-evolution of annotations and artefacts along the development process of interactive systems. The ultimate goal is provide mechanisms that could help the development team to follow design decisions using annotations as a support.
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The unprecedented mobilization of scientists, consequent of the COVID-19 pandemics, has generated an enormous number of scholarly articles that is impossible for a human being to keep track and explore without appropriate tool support. In... more
The unprecedented mobilization of scientists, consequent of the COVID-19 pandemics, has generated an enormous number of scholarly articles that is impossible for a human being to keep track and explore without appropriate tool support. In this context, we created the Covid-on-the-Web project, which aims to assist the access, querying, and sense making of COVID-19 related literature by combining efforts from semantic web, natural language processing, and visualization fields. Particularly, in this paper, we present (i) an RDF dataset, a linked version of the “COVID-19 Open Research Dataset” (CORD-19), enriched via entity linking and argument mining, and (ii) the “Linked Data Visualizer” (LDViz), 28 which assists the querying and visual exploration of the referred dataset. The LDViz tool assists the exploration of different views of the data by combining a querying management interface, which enables the definition of meaningful subsets of data through SPARQL queries, and a visualizat...