Representations in Human–Computer Systems Development

When system developers design a computer system (or other information artefact), they must inevitably make judgements as to how to abstract the domain and how to represent this abstraction in their designs. Over the years human–computer interaction, or more generally information systems design, has had a history of developing competing methods and models for both the process and products of its development. Various paradigms have been suggested, often trying to keep pace with the changing nature of the design problem; from batch processing to interactive systems to work situations and most recently to designing for household environments. It appears timely, then, to review the nature of the design problem that faces the developers of human–computer systems and to consider some of the impact that different representations and different conceptualisations may have on their activities. Green (1998) has suggested that a single model of developing human–computer systems is not desirable, instead arguing for a number of limited theories each of which provides a useful perspective. The aim of this paper is to place competing methods side by side in order to see their strengths and weaknesses more clearly. The central tenet of the paper is that different views of both the human–computer system design process and the different abstractions, or models, that are produced during the design process have varying degrees of utility for designers. It is unlikely that any single method or modelling approach will be optimal in all circumstances. Designers need to be aware of the range of views that exist and of the impact that taking a particular approach may have on the design solution.     

Optimizing sunk investments in e-commerce: a quality assurance challenge for small businesses

In a traditional retail environment, the reputation value of a brand name leads profitable firms with established brands to work hard to maintain quality. A store may rely on its reputation to signal that its goods are of high quality. A retailer that expects repeated purchases by a consumer – if it provides high-quality products – has a strong incentive not to provide defective products or poor service. Translating this type of quality assurance into digital sales media poses unique challenges, particularly for small businesses. Retailers that have only a local geographic reputation require innovative strategies to convince a potential global market that the products or services they provide are of appropriate quality when they make the move into electronic commerce retailing. This paper provides a model that identifies a number of unique factors that should be considered when estimating the optimal level of investment into an e-commerce initiative. Decisions of this type are particularly difficult for small businesses because they may lack expertise in digital marketing and sales and they may have insufficient resources required for ideal levels of investment. These constraints have led to some creative cost and risk minimizing solutions that have been adopted by certain small businesses in their effort to make the transition into the digital marketplace. Published online: 22 August 2001     

Display Design of Process Systems Based on Functional Modelling

The prevalent way to present information in industrial computer displays is by using piping and instrumentation diagrams. Such interfaces have sometimes resulted in difficulties for operators because they are not sufficient to fulfil their needs. A systematic way that supports interface design therefore has to be considered. In the new design framework, two questions must be answered. Firstly, a modelling method is required to describe a process system. Such a modelling method can define the information content that must be displayed in interfaces. Secondly, how to communicate this information to operators efficiently must be considered. This will provide a basis for determining the visual forms that the information should take. This study discusses interface design of human–machine systems from these two points of view. Based on other scholars’ work, a comprehensive set of functional primitives is summarised as a basis to build a functional model of process systems. A library of geometrical presentations for these primitives is then developed. To support effective interface design, the concept of ‘functional macro’ is introduced and a way to map functional model to interface display is illustrated by applying several principles. To make our ideas clear, a central heating system is taken as an example and its functional model is constructed. Based on the functional model, the information to be displayed is determined. Several functional macros are then found in the model and their corresponding displays are constructed. Finally, by using the library of geometrical presentations for functional primitives and functional macros, the display hierarchy of the central heating system is developed. Reusability of functional primitives makes it possible to use the methodology to support interface design of different process systems.     

Linguistic Problems with Requirements and Knowledge Elicitation

Human and conversational aspects of requirements and knowledge identification are employed to show that requirements ‘engineering’ is not the same as civil engineering or scientific problem solving. Not only can requirements not be made fully explicit at the start of a project, they cannot be made fully explicit at all. A need is identified to enhance computer-based information systems (CBIS) development methods to accommodate: plurality of incommensurable perspectives, languages and agendas; dynamic representations of system features that can be experienced rather than abstracted and forced into an abstract paper-based representation; recognition that CBIS development is in general a continuous process where users changing their minds is a natural and necessary indication or organisational vitality.  It is suggested that prototyping and rapid application development go some way to addressing these requirements but that they require further development in the light of the theoretical light thrown on the nature of the problem.     

Communicating the variability of a software-product family to customers

Variability is a central concept in software product family development. Variability empowers constructive reuse and facilitates the derivation of different, customer specific products from the product family. If many customer specific requirements can be realised by exploiting the product family variability, the reuse achieved is obviously high. If not, the reuse is low. It is thus important that the variability of the product family is adequately considered when eliciting requirements from the customer. In this paper we sketch the challenges for requirements engineering for product family applications. More precisely we elaborate on the need to communicate the variability of the product family to the customer. We differentiate between variability aspects which are essential for the customer and aspects which are more related to the technical realisation and need thus not be communicated to the customer. Motivated by the successful usage of use cases in single product development we propose use cases as communication medium for the product family variability. We discuss and illustrate which customer relevant variability aspects can be represented with use cases, and for which aspects use cases are not suitable. Moreover we propose extensions to use case diagrams to support an intuitive representation of customer relevant variability aspects. Received: 14 October 2002 / Accepted: 8 January 2003 Published online: 27 February 2003 This work was partially funded by the CAFé project “From Concept to Application in System Family Engineering”; Eureka Σ! 2023 Programme, ITEA Project ip00004 (BMBF, F?rderkennzeichen 01 IS 002 C) and the state Nord-Rhein-Westfalia. This paper is a significant extension of the paper “Modellierung der Variabilit?t einer Produktfamilie”, [15].     

Trust: Key Elements in Human Supervisory Control Domains

This study aimed to investigate the concept of trust within human supervisory control domains. Using repertory grid methodology, a small homogeneous sample of control engineers from two individual companies within the energy distribution industry were found to share a commonality in what they considered to be important characteristics of trust across three groups: intra-team, inter-team and technology. Sixty constructs were elicited which were reduced to 13 core constructs using content analysis. These were categorised into three separate dimensions; emotive, cognitive and behavioural. Differences were found, both within and between the three groups, according to participants’ scored level of trust for each group. These results are discussed with a view to developing strategies that may enhance trusting behaviours, especially between teams in applied controlled settings.     

Cognitive Automation for Tactical Mission Management: Concept and Prototype Evaluation in Flight Simulator Trials

This paper describes an approach to cognitive and cooperative operator assistance in the field of tactical flight mission management. A framework for a generic functional concept is derived from general considerations of human performance and cognitive engineering. A system built according to these human-centred design principles will be able to keep up with the change of situation parameters, in order to provide situational adapted operator assistance. Such a cognitive assistant system represents an approach to ensure the highest degree possible of situation awareness of the flight deck crew as well as a satisfactory workload level. This generic approach to mission management and crew assistance for military aircraft has been realised in different application domains such as military transport and air-to-ground attack. The Crew Assistant Military Aircraft is a functional prototype for the air transport application. Even applications in the domain of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAV) are in reach. This paper mainly covers one state-of-the-art research and development activity in the domain of combat aircraft: the TMM – Tactical Mission Management System is an experimental solution for the air-to-ground attack role. The TMM has been implemented as a functional prototype in the mission avionics experimental cockpit (MAXC), a development flight simulator at ESG and evaluated with German Air Force pilots as subjects in simulator trials. Therefore, the TMM has been compared with a reference cockpit avionics configuration in terms of task performance, workload, situation awareness and operator acceptance. After giving an overview of the system concepts this paper reports on the experimental design and results of the simulator trial campaign.     

Rationale-Based Use Case Specification

The requirements specification – as outcome of the requirements engineering process – falls short of capturing other useful information generated during this process, such as the justification for selected requirements, trade-offs negotiated by stakeholders and alternative requirements that were discarded. In the context of evolving systems and distributed development, this information is essential. Rationale methods focus on capturing and structuring this missing information. In this paper, we propose an integrated process with dedicated guidance for capturing requirements and their rationale, discuss its tool support and describe the experiences we made during several case studies with students. Although the idea of integrating rationale methods with requirements engineering is not new, few research projects so far have focused on smooth integration, dedicated tool support and detailed guidance for such methods.     

Cooperation, Coordination and Interpretation in Virtual Environments: Some Thoughts on Working-Together

The need for information technology-mediated cooperation seems obvious. However, what is not obvious is what this means and what social demands such cooperation may imply. To explore this is the intention of the paper. As a first step the paper performs an etymological analysis of the words telecooperation and telecoordination. Such an analysis indicates that cooperation happens when people engage in the production of a work as if ‘one mind or body’, where their activities fuse together in a way that makes the suggestion of separation seem incomprehensible. In the work they do not merely aim to achieve an outcome, they also ‘insert’ themselves ‘in’ the work in a way that makes it a human achievement rather than a mere product – this is cooperation as working-together. With this notion of cooperation in mind the paper then proceeds to analyse the social conditions for cooperation as working-together. It shows, using the work of Wittgenstein, that language is fundamental to cooperation and the sharing of knowledge – not language as a system for the exchange of information but language as a medium for the co-creation of a local way of doing, a local language, to capture the local distinctions that make a particular local activity significant and meaningful to the participants. The paper then proceeds to question this strong notion of cooperation. It argues that most cooperative activities tend not to conform with such stringent demands. The paper suggests that a cooperative problem is best viewed as a situation in which ambiguity is accepted as a structural element of the interaction. From this perspective the paper suggests that hermeneutics may be a productive way to understand the creation of shared interpretative spaces that makes mediated cooperation possible. The paper concludes with some implications for mediated cooperative work.     

Can We Ever Escape from Data Overload? A Cognitive Systems Diagnosis

Data overload is a generic and tremendously difficult problem that has only grown with each new wave of technological capabilities. As a generic and persistent problem, three observations are in need of explanation: Why is data overload so difficult to address? Why has each wave of technology exacerbated, rather than resolved, data overload? How are people, as adaptive responsible agents in context, able to cope with the challenge of data overload? In this paper, first we examine three different characterisations that have been offered to capture the nature of the data overload problem and how they lead to different proposed solutions. As a result, we propose that (a) data overload is difficult because of the context sensitivity problem – meaning lies, not in data, but in relationships of data to interests and expectations and (b) new waves of technology exacerbate data overload when they ignore or try to finesse context sensitivity. The paper then summarises the mechanisms of human perception and cognition that enable people to focus on the relevant subset of the available data despite the fact that what is interesting depends on context. By focusing attention on the root issues that make data overload a difficult problem and on people’s fundamental competence, we have identified a set of constraints that all potential solutions must meet. Notable among these constraints is the idea that organisation precedes selectivity. These constraints point toward regions of the solution space that have been little explored. In order to place data in context, designers need to display data in a conceptual space that depicts the relationships, events and contrasts that are informative in a field of practice.     

The Human Communication Space: Towards I-centric Communications

In the last few years, a variety of concepts for service integration and corresponding systems have been developed. On the one hand, they aim for the interworking and integration of classical telecommunications and data communications services. On the other, they are focusing on universal service access from a variety of end-user systems. Many of the technical problems, resulting from the service integration, and service personalisation have been solved during the last years. However, all these systems are driven by the concept of providing several technologies to users by keeping the peculiarity of each service.  Looking at humans’ communication behaviour and their communication space, it is obvious that human beings interact habitually in a set of contexts with their environment. The individual information preferences and needs, persons to interact with, and the set of devices controlled by each individual define their personal communication space. Following this view, a new approach is to build communication systems not on the basis of specific technologies, but on the analysis of the individual communication spaces. The result is a communication system adapted to the demands of each individual (I-centric). The communication system will act on behalf of users’ demands, reflecting recent actions to enable profiling and self-adaptation to contexts and situations.  In this paper, we introduce I-centric Communications, an approach to design communication systems that adapt themselves to the individual communication space and individual environment and situation. In this context “I” means I, or individual, “Centric” means adaptable to I requirements and a certain user environment.     

A Representational Framework for Scenarios of System Use

Scenarios are becoming widely used in three areas of system development: software engineering, human–computer interaction (HCI), and organisational process design. There are many reasons to use scenarios during system design. The one usually advanced in support of the practice is to aid the processes of validating the developers’ understanding of the customers’ or users’ work practices, organisational goals and structures, and system requirements. All three areas identified above deal with these processes, and not surprisingly this has given rise to a profusion of scenario-based practices and representations. Yet there has been little analysis of why scenarios should be useful, let alone whether they are. Only by having such a framework for understanding what scenarios are, and what they are for, can we begin to evaluate different scenario approaches in specific development contexts. This paper is a contribution toward such a framework. We lay out a space of representational possibilities for scenarios and enumerate a set of values or criteria that are important for different uses of scenarios. We then summarise several salient representations drawn from the software engineering, HCI, and organisational process design communities to clarify how these representational choices contribute to or detract from the goals of the respective practices. Finally, we discuss how scenario representations from one area of design may be useful in others, and we discuss the relationship between these representations and other significant early-design and requirements engineering practices.     

Specifications, Design and Evaluation of an Advanced Human-Adapted Supervisory System

Supervision of highly automated processes is an interdisciplinary research area. Knowledge in the fields of automation, process knowledge, machine engineering, ‘work post’ ergonomics, cognitive ergonomics, working psychology, sociology and so on is necessary to design efficient supervisory systems. This is because supervision is an activity in which man, despite the increasing automation of recent years, is still present. Our research concerns monitoring tasks and diagnosis tasks in continuous processes. In this paper we propose specifications for an advanced human-adapted supervisory system (AHASS) integrating representation characteristics of the production system, such as functional, structural and behavioural aspects based on cognitive engineering models, with the use of advanced algorithms of detection and location. The main idea is to design a supervisory system well balanced between human and technical aspects. Indeed, man–machine system-centred approaches can deal to another extreme like purely technical approaches. These specifications have been used to design an AHASS for a nuclear fuel reprocessing system that has been evaluated through experiments with experienced operators. The results show that the approach is interesting because the boarder between support and assistantship is never crossed.     

Requirements Management: A Cinderella Story

Why do the business requirements and the final software product often have little in common? Why are stakeholders, developers and managers reluctant to embrace a full requirements process? Why does everybody say, ‘We don’t have time for requirements’? Why is the potentially most beneficial part of the development process ignored or short-changed?  Following are some observations about why the real requirements for the product often go undiscovered. We will address this by focusing on the different concerns of the people involved in requirements.     

Socio-Technical and Soft Approaches to Information Requirements Elicitation in the Post-Methodology Era

The contributors to this special issue focus on socio-technical and soft approaches to information requirements elicitation and systems development. They represent a growing body of research and practice in this field. This review presents an overview and analysis of the salient themes within the papers encompassing their common underlying framework, the methodologies and tools and techniques presented, the organisational situations in which they are deployed and the issues they seek to address. It will be argued in the review that the contributions to this special edition exemplify the ‘post-methodological era’ and the ‘contingency approaches’ from which it is formed.     

Exploring agent support at the user interface in e-commerce applications

In this paper, we present some of the results from our ongoing research work in the area of ‘agent support’ for electronic commerce, particularly at the user interface level. Our goal is to provide intelligent agents to assist both the consumers and the vendors in an electronic shopping environment. Users with a wide variety of different needs are expected to use the electronic shopping application and their expectations about the interface could vary a lot. Traditional studies of user interface technology have shown the existence of a ‘gap’ between what the user interface actually lets the users do and the users’ expectations. Agent technology, in the form of personalized user interface agents, can help to narrow this gap. Such agents can be used to give a personalized service to the user by knowing the user’s preferences. By doing so, they can assist in the various stages of the users’ shopping process, provide tailored product recommendations by filtering information on behalf of their users and reduce the information overload. From a vendor’s perspective, a software sales agent could be used for price negotiation with the consumer. Such agents would give the flexibility offered by negotiation without the burden of having to provide human presence to an online store to handle such negotiations. Published online: 25 July 2001     

MABA-MABA or Abracadabra? Progress on Human–Automation Co-ordination

In this paper we argue that substitution-based function allocation methods (such as MABA-MABA, or Men-Are-Better-At/Machines-Are-Better-At lists) cannot provide progress on human–automation co-ordination. Quantitative ‘who does what’ allocation does not work because the real effects of automation are qualitative: it transforms human practice and forces people to adapt their skills and routines. Rather than re-inventing or refining substitution-based methods, we propose that the more pressing question on human–automation co-ordination is ‘How do we make them get along together?’ Correspondence and offprint requests to: S. W. A. Dekker, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IKP, Link?ping Institute of Technology, SE - 581 83 Link?ping, Sweden. Tel.: +46 13 281646; fax +4613282579; email: sidde@ikp.liu.se     

InfoPoint: A Device that Provides a Uniform User Interface to Allow Appliances to Work Together over a Network

This paper proposes a new hand-held device called “InfoPoint” that allows appliances to work together over a network. We have applied the idea of “drag-and-drop” operation as provided in the GUIs of PC and workstation desktop environment. InfoPoint provides a unified interface that gives different types of appliances “drag-and-drop”-like behaviour for the transfer of data. Moreover, it can transfer data from/to non-appliances such as pieces of paper. As a result, InfoPoint allows appliances to work together, in the real-world environment, in terms of data transfer. A prototype of InfoPoint has been implemented and several experimental applications have been investigated. InfoPoint has shown its applicability in a variety of circumstances. We believe that the idea proposed in this paper will be a significant technology in the network of the future.     

Making Space for Voice: Technologies to Support Children’s Fantasy and Storytelling

Fantasy play and storytelling serve an important role in young children’s development. While computers are increasingly present in the world of young children, there is a lack of computational tools to support children’s voices in everyday storytelling, particularly in the context of fantasy play. We believe that there is a need for computational systems that engage in story-listening rather than story-telling. This paper introduces StoryMat, a system that supports and listens to children’s voices in their own storytelling play. StoryMat offers a child-driven, story-listening space by recording and recalling children’s narrating voices, and the movements they make with their stuffed animals on a colourful story-evoking quilt. Empirical research with children shows that StoryMat fosters developmentally advanced forms of storytelling of the kind that has been shown to provide a bridge to written literacy, and provides a space where children engage in fantasy storytelling collaboratively with or without a playmate. The paper addresses the importance of supporting young children’s fantasy play and suggests a new way for technology to play an integral part in that activity.     

Computer security

A strong factor in the early development of computers was security – the computations that motivated their development, such as decrypting intercepted messages, generating gunnery tables, and developing weapons, had military applications. But the computers themselves were so big and so few that they were relatively easy to protect simply by limiting physical access to them to their programmers and operators. Today, computers have shrunk so that a web server can be hidden in a matchbox and have become so common that few people can give an accurate count of the number they have in their homes and automobiles, much less the number they use in the course of a day. Computers constantly communicate with one another; an isolated computer is crippled. The meaning and implications of “computer security” have changed over the years as well. This paper reviews major concepts and principles of computer security as it stands today. It strives not to delve deeply into specific technical areas such as operating system security, access control, network security, intrusion detection, and so on, but to paint the topic with a broad brush. Published online: 27 July 2001