The design of commercial products that are intended to serve millions of people has been a challenge for collaborative approaches. The creation and use of fictional users, concrete representations commonly referred to as ‘personas’, is a relatively new interaction design technique. It is not without problems and can be used inappropriately, but based on experience and analysis it has extraordinary potential. Not only can it be a powerful tool for true participation in design, it also forces designers to consider social and political aspects of design that otherwise often go unexamined.

In this paper, we present the Adora approac to object-oriented modeling of software (Adora stands for analysis and description of requirements and arc itecture). T e main features of Adora t at distinguis it from ot er approac es like UML are t e use of abstract objects (instead of classes) as t e basis of t e model, a systematic hierarchical decomposition of t e modeled system and t e integration of all aspects of t e system in one coherent model. T e paper introduces t e concepts of Adora and t e rationale be ind t em, gives an overview of t e language, sketc es a novel concept for visualizing t e model ierarc y wit a tool and reports t e results of a validation experiment for t e Adora language. r 2002 ElsevierSsevie Ltd. All rig ts reserved.

This paper discusses the issues related to the application of wireless communication and positioning technologies to the development of hand-held electronic tour guides. These issues are discussed presenting HIPS, a project recently funded by the European Commission that aims at developing a hand-held electronic tour guide allowing tourists to navigate both the physical space and a related information space when visiting a museum or a city. HIPS detects the position of the tourist and provides personalised and contextual information. The methodological approach of the project plays a fundamental role for the development of such a system: user-centred design and scenario-based design are means for assuring that the final system is appropriate to the user and to the context of use. The usability issues of HIPS are also discussed comparing its features to other audio guides like the one currently available in the Louvre Museum. 1. Introduction The integration of hand-held computing wit...

This paper presents a case study of the development of an interface to a novel and complex form of document retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. A study involving users (with such searching needs) from the start of the design process is described covering initial examination of user needs and tasks; preliminary design and testing of interface components; building, testing, and further refining an interface; before finally conducting usability tests of the system. Lessons are learned at every stage of the process leading to a much more informed view of how such an interface should be built. 1.

Who are the users of a cross-language retrieval system? Under what circumstances do they need to perform such multi-language searches? How will the task and the context of use affect successful interaction with the system? Answers to these questions were explored in a user study performed as part of the design stages of Clarity, a EU founded project on cross-language information retrieval. The findings resulted in a rethink of the planned user interface and a consequent expansion of the set of services offered. This paper reports on the methodology and techniques used for the elicitation of user requirements as well as how these were in turn transformed into new design solutions.

Abstract. Scenarios have gained acceptance in both research and practice as a way of grounding softwareengineering projects in the users ’ work. However, the research on scenario-based design (SBD) includes very few studies of how scenarios are actually used by practising software engineers in real-world projects. Such studies are needed to evaluate current SBD approaches and advance our general understanding of what scenarios contribute to design. This longitudinal field study analyses the use of scenarios during the conceptual design of a large information system. The role of the scenarios is compared and contrasted with that of three other design artefacts: the requirements specification, the business model, and the user interface prototype. The distinguishing features of the scenarios were that they were task-based and descriptive. By being task-based the scenarios strung individual events and activities together in purposeful sequences and, thereby, provided an intermediate level of description that was both an instantiation of overall work objectives and a fairly persistent context for the gradual elaboration of subtasks. By being descriptive the scenarios preserved a real-world feel of the contents, flow, and dynamics of the users ’ work. The scenarios made the users ’ work recognisable to the software engineers as a complex but organised human activity. This way the scenarios attained a unifying role as mediator among both the design artefacts and the software engineers, whilst they were not used for communication with users. The scenarios were, however, discontinued before the completion of the conceptual design because their creation and management was dependent on a few software engineers who were also the driving forces of several other project activities. Finally, the software engineers valued the concreteness and coherence of the scenarios although it entailed a risk of missing some effective re-conceptions of the users’ work.

This paper examines the use of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a representation for interaction design. We discuss the trade-offs related to applying UML outside its intended application domain and the suitability of UML components for modeling various aspects of interaction: representing user requirements, early envisionment of interaction, task modeling, navigation and detailed interaction specification. Where appropriate we propose and illustrate the combination of UML with purpose-specific notations.

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This paper describes the development of Net Neighbours, an online shopping scheme that widens Internet access to older people via volunteer telephone intermediaries. It outlines the processes of: problem identification, designing the telephone interaction, the financial model and the interface for the volunteer. It describes the application and adaptation of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques to address the needs of the local charity that co-developed the scheme. The paper begins by reporting the ethnographic work that led to the scheme; it then describes the pilot study conducted with Age Concern, York. It maps the various possible configurations for the scheme in a series of financial models expressed in tree diagrams and goes on to describe the use of pastiche scenarios in developing designs. Pastiche scenarios draw on fiction as a resource to explore, in an engaging manner, the social issues raised by technological innovations; the paper presents extracts from three such scenarios that were used to reason about dependability issues with Age Concern staff. The scheme is ongoing and plans are currently being made to extend it by recruiting university staff and other office workers as volunteer intermediaries. It is hoped that the scheme will become widely available across the city and in other locations around the UK. It is argued that volunteer telephone intermediaries can bridge digital divides and make Internet services accessible to those excluded either by age, disability or lack of resources. The development of the scheme is a case study in the ways that HCI techniques can be adopted and adapted in order to design for civil society. 1

This report is broken down into four main sections, firstly giving the primary aims of the proposed research, followed by a review of background reading of present Information Visualisation (IV) techniques, which are categorised using an existing framework. This is followed by a description of the general visualisation problem we are concerned with plus a description of the specific area where such a visualisation could be of benefit. We then discuss the visualisation techniques that address situations that have the greatest similarity to our own problem, and explain why they still lack suitability for our purposes. Then, two prototypes that are under development are described, and the report finishes with a breakdown of proposed future work