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The idea of setting up this special issue came during CHI '95 when somebody asked me what the situation was of research in Human-Computer Interaction in Italy.
HCI is a multi-disciplinary research effort involving, inter alia, psychology, sociology, linguistics, computer and information science, which addresses the design, evaluation and use of information technology from a user-centred perspective.
The papers collected in this number do not cover all the topics on which people are currently working in Italy and not all the research groups working on HCI are represented here. However this collection gives an idea of the research trends and of the dimension of the growth of this research field in Italy.
In the first section of this introduction, the research topics addressed in the presented paper are outlined, in the second section some relevant activities in the field are mentioned.
The papers in this special issue can be divided into the following major themes: user interface design, advanced interfaces, definition and evaluation of usability. The presentation order of the papers within the themes is not alphabetical, but tries to help the reader in following a logical schema.
The papers addressing this topic cover different aspects of the UI design process: model of interaction, task analysis and task modelling techniques, formal methods to specify and evaluate interfaces.
The formalization of a model of interaction is the center topic of the first paper in this group. Bottoni et al. (Pictorial Computing Laboratory) present a model for visual interactive computing called Com2 . It is based on the abstraction that the user and the computer program communicate through images making a symmetrically closed loop through which the information flow (Communication aspect) and that reasoning and computation activities are performed in turn by the machine and the user (Computational aspect). Visual languages thus play the major role in this interaction model. To explain this model, the authors describe a session of an interaction with a system for biopsy analysis that has been developed following this approach.
Missikoff and Pizzicanella in their paper, following Harel's [1] suggestion that the future is "visual" and that "the intricate nature of computer-related systems ... should be represented by visual formalism: visual because they are to be generated, comprehended, and communicated by humans; formal, because they are to manipulated, maintained, and analyzed by computers", present a visual approach to object oriented analysis, outlining how a visual approach to formal notations puts together the advantage of using a precise and unambiguous notation and the advantage of the intuitiveness offered by the visual formalism.
The topics of the following papers range from the description of an approach to task analysis and task modelling to the illustration of formal methods to specify and evaluate human computer interaction: all this papers have the common objective of improving the usability of the interface early and continuously in the design phase.
Patrizia Marti in her paper presents a task-centred approach to interface design, in particular, it is shown how task analysis and task modelling can be exploited throughout the development process and which are the positive effects in terms of usability. To describe this approach, the author discusses the experience of the Esprit Project CHARADE, a system for handling environmental emergencies.
The method presented in Faconti and Fornaro' s paper allows to describe in a formal way the human behaviour when interacting with a computer by extending the formal model of the interface with the model of the cognitive resources needed to interact with it. This approach provides then a valid method not only to specify the human-machine interaction, but also to argue on the interface usability before the system is built.
Fabio Paterno' presents the activity of the User Centered Design Group at CNUCE in this research area. The Author, after having shown the several advantages of using formal methods in interface design, presents a task-driven formal specification of interactive system software. The method called TLIM (Tasks, LOTOS, Interactors Modelling) aims at having a structured and systematic approach to interface design, at introducing the user's point of view in the software modelling component of an interactive system and at applying formal verification techniques to check interface properties. This formalism is at the basis of a task-oriented toolkit for the software development of user interfaces.
de Rosis et al.'s paper presents the preliminary work on the development of a tool based on Petri nets supporting the designer in specifying and evaluating context-customized user interfaces in order to detect usability problems early in the design phase. This tool allows the building of the interface model by adding at the net description information about the logical and physical aspects of the interface. The designer can then simulate the interaction with the system, evaluate some properties of the interface and discover errors before the system is actually implemented.
This group of papers describes advanced interfaces to different types of systems. Most of them uses AI methodologies in order to improve the interaction with complex systems.
The first paper of this group (Catarci et al.) describes a Visual Query System (VQS) that allows different classes of users to access multiple, heterogeneous databases by means of an adaptive interface that offer several interaction paradigms. The adaptation regards both the query and the presentation of the results phases. The authors also describe some interesting results of evaluation tests aiming at measuring the performance of naive and expert users in querying the system using the different interaction paradigms offered by their VQS.
The paper by Meloni et al. describes an advanced interface to an Intelligent Tutoring System developed by the MEDIA group at ALENIA. This is the only paper here that represents the Italian industrial world. The authors illustrate how metaphors and multimedia technology can be used effectively in order to provide the students with a realistic environment where they can interact with the system in a very intuitive and easy way.
Stock et al. present how they combined user modelling and multimodality (natural language, hypertext and touch screen) techniques in the interface of ALFRESCO, an interactive system for users interested in Fourteenth Century Italian art. The result of this approach is an effective communication between the user and the system using natural language and manipulating various entities such as images and text.
Cesta and D'Aloisi present a model of interface for repetitive tasks. The proposed approach is based on software agents and distributed architectures. The result of this approach is an intelligent and active interface that help users in avoiding repetition of patterns of actions, leaving to them the control over the agent actions.
The main research topic at the Multimedia Communication Laboratory of the University of Siena is the definition and evaluation of usability. Rizzo et al. in this paper define seven guidelines for managing human errors in user-centred design. Each guideline is explained taking example by the design experiences of the group. The result is that following these guidelines in designing an interface can help in reducing the cost of the evaluation process.
There are two relevant activities concerning HCI research in Italy.
The first one is the International Workshops on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) organized bi-annually by the PCL, jointly with the database and user-interface group of the Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica of the University of Rome. They constitute major events in which new ideas and experimental systems are presented.
The second one regards the initiatives of the Working Group on Intelligent Interfaces of the AI*IA. This group organizes workshops that aim at bringing together people from both the Academic and the Industrial world that do research on intelligent interfaces or uses them for their work.
More and detailed information about these two initiatives and some others interesting pointers to HCI activities in Italy can be found at http://aos2.uniba.it:8080/nadja.html .
This introduction with links to the home pages of the research groups presented here is available at http://aos2.uniba.it:8080/hciitaly.html .
1. Harel D., On Visual Formalism. CAMC, Vol. 31, Nr. 5, 514-530. 1988.
Thanks to Steven Pemberton for the opportunity to organize this number and to all the reviewers.
Berardina Nadja De Carolis is a PhD student at the Dipartimento di Discipline Scientifiche: Sezione di Informatica, III Università di Roma - Via della Vasca Navale, 60 - Rome - Italy.
She cooperates also with the research group on Intelligent Interfaces of the Department of Information Science of the University of Bari.
For more details: http://aos2.uniba.it:8080/nadja.html
email: nadja@aos2.uniba.it
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Vol.28 No.3, July 1996 |
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