Maria Francesca Costabile Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Bari, Italy
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Transcript of Maria Francesca Costabile Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Bari, Italy
Supporting Domain-Expert Users
Pisa, 23-24 September 2002
Maria Francesca Costabile
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Bari, Italy
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
Outline Who we are End-users Domain-expert users Characteristics of systems for domain-expert users Software Shaping Workshops: environments for
supporting domain-expert users development
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
Maria Francesca Costabile*Antonio Piccinno*Dip. Informatica Università di Bari, Italy
Daniela Fogli*
Piero Mussio* Dip. Elettronica per l'Automazione Università di Brescia, Italy
Giuseppe Fresta ISTI "A. Faedo" CNR, Pisa, Italy
*Pictorial Computing Laboratory University of Rome “La Sapienza” Italy
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
Pictorial Computing Laboratory PCL started in 1993 at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” Director: Stefano Levialdi Main researchers: M.F. Costabile, Piero Mussio, P. Bottoni Primary theme: Analysis and use of images in HCI
Formal theory of Visual Languages to model Visual Interaction
IEEE Symposia on Visual Languages, now Symposia on Human-Centric Computing
Journal on Visual Languages and Computer Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) Conferences, AVI’04 in Bari
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
End-users A user of an application program. Typically, the term means that
the person is not a computer programmer. A person who uses a computer as part of their daily life or daily work, but is not interested in computers per se.
Allen Cypher, “Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration“
End-User Computing is “..the adoption and use of information technology by people outside the information system department, to develop software applications in support of organizational tasks”
Brancheau and Brown, “The Management of End-User Computing: Status and Directions”, ACM Computing Surveys, 25 (4), 1993
End-users are experts in a specific domain, who use computer systems to develop software applications
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
Domain-expert users Domain-expert users: experts in a specific domain, not necessarily
experts in computer science, who use computer environments to perform their daily tasks
They are responsible for the tasks accomplished through the system
They must understand the consequences of the system activity and must be in control of the interactive computation
Domain examples: Medicine Mechanical Engineer Earth Science
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
The communicational gap Users and designers adopt different reasoning
strategies: heuristic vs. algorithmic examples, analogies vs. deductive abstract tools concreteness vs. abstraction
Users are forced to express their problems in “computerese”
Interactive systems are difficult to learn and use
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
Bridging the gap
Recognizing users as experts!!! in their field, not in CS
Recognizing that experts develop languages and notations to reason on problems and communicate solutions
Designing systems which make abstract CS concepts concrete to users and allow users to follow their learning and reasoning strategies
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
The designer teamSoftware Experts
Domain Experts HCI Experts
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
User diversity within a domain It depends not only on user skill, culture, knowledge,
but also on specific abilities (physical/cognitve), tasks and context
“using the system changes the users, and as they change they will use the system in new ways”
Nielsen, Usability Engineering
New uses of the system make the environment evolve and force to adapt the system to the evolved user and environment
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
Loop 2
Loop 1
TechnologyOrganizational context
User view of the task
System
Adapted from [Bourguin & al. 2001]
Co-evolution
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
User tailoring User diversity user tailoring
Decoupling between pictorial and computational representations of concepts
PCL theory of visual sentences and model of visual interaction
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
PCL interaction model
screen
materialization materialization
interpretation interpretation
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
characteristic structures a characteristic structure (cs) is a set of pixels relevant
to the interaction process
Edit
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
attributed symbols a set of css can be identified on an image i on the screen
the computer interprets every gesture with respect to the image i on the screen using a description d of it
d is a set of attributed symbols, each describing the computational meaning of a cs in i
Bullet (b11, 279, 224, 18, blue, comp-action=‘link to a page’) tuple of properties
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
visual sentence the relations between characteristic structures and
attributed symbols are specified by 2 functions:
int: CSi d (interpretation function)where CSi is the set of css in image i
mat: d CSi (materialization function)
a visual sentence (vs) is a triple < i, d, < int, mat > >
a visual language VL is a set of vss
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
mat & int A concept is materialised on the screen through a mat
function that associates the attributed symbol describing the concept to a specific cs
The same concept can be materialised in another cs through a different mat function
int & mat allow user tailoring
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
Example in earth science domain An Environmental Agency
Experts perform: photo interpretation of satellite images to obtain medium and
long term environmental forecast organize the forecast results into reports and thematic maps for
different communities of client experts (planner, decision maker, ...)
Two categories of experts arise:photo-interpreters and clerks, sharing similar notations but having different tasks to achieve
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
int & mat for the photo-interpreter
dint1 mat1
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
int & mat for the clerk
dint2 mat2
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
How to support domain-expert users
Design environments in which domain-expert users interact in their visual notations and with tools familiar to them
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
Software Shaping Workshops Software environments as workshops in which users
find and use virtual tools resembling their notations and habits and necessary to accomplish their activities
Analogy to real workshops, such as blacksmith or joiner workshops
More user categories SSW hierarchy
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
System workshop
B-GlacManager
generation
Application workshop
B-monitore
generation
Application workshop
B-glacier
System workshop
B-SwEngineer
System workshop
B-AirManager
System workshop
B-VegManager
generationgeneration
… …
generation
…
generation
…
A 3-level Visual Workshop Hierarchy
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
The photo-interpreter environment
The photo-interpreter obtains the spectral signature of the ‘ablation area’ using tools and notations familiar to her
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
The clerk environment
The clerk obtains the glaciological parameters using the button ‘ablation area’ using tools and notations familiar to him
Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002
Conclusion Software Shaping Workshops are computer environments aimed
at supporting the activities of domain-expert users Novel features of our approach are:
1) it is collaborative in that end-users, as domain experts, assume a responsibility in the design;
2) the SSWs are able to associate different pictorial representations to a same computational representation, and vice versa, thus permitting end-user tailoring;
3) end-users can perform their tasks interacting with the SSWs through interaction visual languages, which resemble their traditional notations and tools;
4) the system is evolutive and allows the domain-expert user to generate another SSW with new functionalities.
We are experimenting this apprach in various domains, using the software tool BANCO