Designing Groupware systems requires methods and tools that cover all aspects of Groupware systems. We present a method that utilizes known theoretical insights and makes them usable in practice. In our method, the design of Groupware systems is driven by an extensive task analysis followed by structured design and iterative evaluation using usability criteria. Using a combination of multiple complementary representations and techniques, a wide range of aspects of Groupware design is covered. The method is built on our experiences and is used in practice by several companies and educational institutes in Europe. We define the design process, the models needed and the tools that support the design process.

With the explosion of devices, computing platforms, contextual conditions, user interfaces become more confronted to a need to be adapted to multiple configurations of the context of use. In the past, many techniques were developed to perform a task analysis for obtaining a single user interface that is adapted for a single context of use. As this user interface may become unusable for other contexts of use, there emerges a need for modelling tasks which can be supported in multiple contexts of use, considering multiple combinations of the contextual conditions. For this

Abstract—When we connect smart devices to one another we open up many new possibilities. One interesting possibility is to support high-level semantic interaction without requiring multiple steps on multiple devices. In this paper we investigate how ontologies, runtime task models, Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) models, and the blackboard architectural pattern may be used to enable semantic interaction for pervasive computing. An initial demonstrator was developed to visualize and manipulate semantic connections between devices in a smart home environment. The demonstrator provides a way for users to physically interact with devices on a high level of semantic abstraction without being bothered with the low-level details. Keywords-Semantic Web; user interaction; smart home; ontologies; blackboard architectural pattern; task model; BDI model I.

INTRODUCTION User-Centered Design (UCD) has yielded many forms of design practices in which various characteristics of the context of use are considered. Among these, task analysis is widely recognized as one fundamental way not only to ensure some user-centered design (Hackos & Redish, 1998) but to improve the understanding of how a user may interact with a user interface to accomplish a given interactive task. A task model is often defined as a description of an interactive task to be performed by the user of an application through the application's user interface. Individual elements in a task model represent specific actions that the user may undertake. Information on subtask ordering as well as conditions on task execution is also included in the model. 135 LE071-06 LE071-Diaper & Stanton LE071-Diaper-v2.cls July 30, 2003 11:20 Char Count= 0 136 LIMBOURG AND VANDERDONCKT Task analysis methods have been introduced from disciplines with different backgrounds, different concerns,

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Groupware Task Analysis is a task analysis method that deals with the context of use of a system in the broadest sense. The task world is seen from three viewpoints that deal with different aspects of the world. The processes of GTA and their background are described in detail. In addition a task analysis tool EUTERPE is described. EUTERPE is based on GTA and allows capturing of the task models and provides some basic analysis primitives.

Task modelling and user interface design are iterative development processes.

This work is about supporting user interface design by means of explicit design representations, in particular models.

Multiple versions and expressions of task models used in user interface design, specification, and verification of interactive systems have led to an ontological problem of identifying and understanding concepts which are similar or different across models. This variety raises a particular problem in model-based approaches for designing user interfaces as different task models, possibly with different vocabularies, different formalisms, different concepts are exploited: no software tool is able today to accommodate any task models as input for a user-centred design process. DOLPHIN

A number of task modelling notations have been developed in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) communities, often with different goals and thus different strengths. Usually, each model is designed to be employed at a specific phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Without an explicit understanding of the different attributes of these models, it is difficult to select a specific one to achieve one's goals. To address this issue, we propose a taxonomy consisting of several axes. The elements of the taxonomy have been defined according to various criteria we have found useful to consider when having to decide on a specific methodology or task model. In this chapter, we first present our taxonomy. We then illustrate it with a few examples. We choose these models either because we used them ourselves, or because they are the most popular in the literature.