The cognitive dimensions framework is a broad-brush evaluation technique for interactive devices and for non-interactive notations. It sets out a small vocabulary of terms designed to capture the cognitively-relevant aspects of structure, and shows how they can be traded off against each other. The purpose of this paper is to propose the framework as an evaluation technique for visual programming environments. We apply it to two commercially-available dataflow languages (with further examples from other systems) and conclude that it is effective and insightful; other HCI-based evaluation techniques focus on different aspects and would make good complements. Insofar as the examples we used are representative, current VPLs are successful in achieving a good `closeness of match', but designers need to consider the `viscosity' (resistance to local change) and the `secondary notation' (possibility of conveying extra meaning by choice of layout, colour, etc.).

The design of CSCW systems has often had its roots in ethnomethodological understandings of work and investigations of working settings. Increasingly, we are also seeing these ideas applied to critique and inform HCI design more generally. However, the attempt to design from the basis of ethnomethodology is fraught with methodological dangers. In particular, ethnomethodology’s overriding concern with the detail of practice poses some serious problems when attempts are made to design around such understandings. In this paper, we discuss the range and application of ethnomethodological investigations of technology in working settings, describe how ethnomethodologically-affiliated work has approached system design and discuss ways that ethnomethodology can move from design critique to design practice: the advent of technomethodology.

In this article, I explore an ecological approach to social interaction, using the concept of affordances to describe material properties of the environment that affect how people interact. My examples come mainly from the design of technologies that support collaboration. The physical properties of paper and electronic media—for instance electronic mail or video communication system —affects how they can be used and how people can use them to interact. Many of these effects are due to differences in the degree to which the media afford prediction and exploration. Because they are based on material properties, these affordances run deep, and trying to design against their grain is not easy. Difficulties of design, however, can shed light on subtleties o f interaction that might otherwise be overlooked. Thus design is both guided by, and can guide, an ecological approach to social interaction. Nonetheless, design is only one example of the wide range of issues an ecological approach to social behaviour m ight address. Such an approach may provide as fundamental a challenge to existing perspectives on social interaction as it has to traditional theories of perception.

Technology development in HCI can be interpreted as a co-evolution of tasks and artifacts. The tasks people actually engage in (successfully or problematically) and those they wish to engage in (or perhaps merely to imagine) define requirements for future technology, and specifically for new HCI artifacts. These artifacts, in turn, open up new possibilities for human tasks, new ways to do familiar things, entirely new kinds of things to do. In this paper we describe psychological design rationale as an approach to augmenting HCI technology development and to clarifying the sense in which HCI artifacts embody psychological theory. A psychological design rationale is an enumeration of the psychological claims embodied by an artifact for the situations in which it is used. As an example, we present our design work with the View Matcher, a Smalltalk programming environment for coordinating multiple views of an example application. In particular, we show how psychological design rationale was used to develop a view matcher for code reuse from prior design rationales for related programming tasks and environments. 1. TASKS AND ARTIFACTS In 1605, Sir Francis Bacon called for a "natural history of trades." He urged that technical tools, techniques and processes be made more public and explicit. This was one element in his broader project of developing practical science, and hinged on the assumption that if such knowledge could be more systematically considered and integrated, human progress would necessarily result. Thus, Bacon suggested that new concepts and inventions would result "by a connexion and transferring of the observations of one Arte, to the use of another, when the experiences of several misteries shall fall under the consideration of one man's minde."(1970: Book...

Data modelling reveals the internal structure of an information system, abstracting away from details of the physical representation. We show that entity-relationship modelling, a well-tried example of a data-modelling technique, can be applied to both interactive and non-interactive information artefacts in the domain of HCI. By extending the conventional ER notation slightly (to give ERMIA, Entity-Relationship Modelling for Information Artefacts) it can be used to describe differences between different representations of the same information, differences between user's conceptual models of the same device, and the structure and update requirements of distributed information in a worksystem. It also yields symbolic-level estimates of Card et al.'s (1994) index of `cost-of-knowledge' in an informa- tion structure, plus a novel index, the `cost-of-update'; these symbolic estimates offer a useful complement to the highly detailed analyses of time costs obtainable from GOMS-like...

Software development remains mentally challenging despite the continual advancement of training, techniques, and tools. Because completely automating software development is currently impossible, it makes sense to seriously consider how tools can improve the mental activities of developers apart from automating them away. Such mental assistance can be called “cognitive support”. Understanding and developing cognitive support in software engineering tools is an important research issue but, unfortunately, at the moment our theoretical foundations for it are inadequately developed. Furthermore, much of the relevant research has occurred outside of the software engineering community, and is therefore not easily available to the researchers who typically develop software engineering tools. Tool evaluation, comparison, and development are consequently impaired. The present work introduces a theoretical framework intended to seed further systematic study of cognitive support in the field of software engineering tools. This theoretical framework, called RODS, imports ideas and methods from a field of cognitive science called “distributed cognition”. The crucial concept in RODS is that cognitive support can be understood and explained in terms of the computational advantages that are conferred when cognition is redistributed between software developer and their tools and environment. The name RODS, in fact, comes from the

Designers need guidance in tracing knowledge to support the iterative development of interactive software interfaces. Claims show promise in capturing design knowledge with concise descriptions of an artifact’s psychological effects on users, but adoptions and modifications made during design processes result in new claims. The manner in which new claims are created based on previous claims establishes unique knowledge relationships not well captured by existing research. This paper proposes six claim relationship types presented with general concepts and examples, allowing a more robust claims analysis process to emerge. The definition of relationships acknowledges claim evolution methods inherent in design, facilitating knowledge reuse and providing structure to advance the science of design. 1.

Software design methods share many characteristics with design methods in other fields. All these methods are the progeny of philosophies of design that are in turn influenced by more general philosophic movements. This essay begins with the influence of philosophies of science on the study of design, highlighting the effects on design discourse of Cartesian rationality, the hypothetico-deductive account of scientific progress, and Kuhnian paradigms. Next, the influence of the constructivist and humanist movements on design thinking are considered, culminating in the introduction of a philosophy of design based on hermeneutics, or interpretation. The influence of design philosophy on software design methods begins a categorization of several software design methods according to the design theory framework, with some emphasis on design methods that support a hermeneutical style of design. Some justification for a pluralistic approach to software design methodology rounds out the essay. ...

Design is an inherently multidisciplinary endeavor. This raises the question of how to develop systems in ways that can best leverage the perspectives, practices, and knowledge bases of these different areas. Agile software development and usability engineering both address important aspects of system design, but there are tensions between the methods that make them difficult to integrate. This work presents a development approach that draws from extreme programming (XP), a widely practiced agile software development process, and scenariobased design (SBD), an established usability engineering process. It describes three key questions that need to be addressed for agile software development methods and usability engineering practices to work together effectively, and it introduces interface architectures and design representations that can address these questions.

A few representations have been used for capturing design rationale. It is important to know in what ways they are adequate or limited so that we know how to improve them. In this paper, we develop a framework for evaluating design rationale representations based on a set of generic design tasks. We build the framework by progressively differentiating the elements of design rationale that, when made explicit, support an increasing number of the design tasks. With this framework, we evaluate the expressiveness of the existing representations. We also present a language, DRL, that we believe is the most expressive of the existing representations without being too complex for human users. We also discuss the limitations of DRL as open problems for further research.