Abstract The rapid growth in interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a significant driver of research and business activities in recent years. This raises new critical issues, particularly concerning interaction with AI systems. This article first presents a survey that identifies the primary issues addressed in Human-Centered AI (HCAI), focusing on the interaction with AI systems. The survey outcomes permit to clarify disciplines, concepts, and terms around HCAI, solutions to design and evaluate HCAI systems, and the emerging challenges; these are all discussed with the aim of supporting researchers in identifying more pertinent approaches to create HCAI systems. Another main finding emerging from the survey is the need to create Symbiotic AI (SAI) systems. Definitions of both HCAI systems and SAI systems are provided. To illustrate and frame SAI more clearly, we focus on medical applications, discussing two case studies of SAI systems.

Several studies have shown that involving users in design processes is a key factor in understanding user needs and essential for designing computer systems capable of providing valuable user experiences. However, many practitioners do not emphasize user needs sufficiently and neglect user involvement in software design and development. The UCD Sprint is a recently proposed, step-by-step, cost-effective process that focuses on involving users in design activities. This article reports a mixed-method study in which, for the first time, practitioners working in companies used the UCD Sprint; the study’s main objective was to investigate the impact of the UCD Sprint on practitioners’ design practices. The results show that, among the various activities associated with this process, those that involved users were particularly appreciated by practitioners. Thus, the UCD Sprint can enhance the innovativeness of company design practices; it enables practitioners to obtain sufficient information to create systems that fit users’ needs.

Remote usability testing is performed by evaluators who are in different physical locations from the participants (synchronous remote testing) and possibly operating at different times (asynchronous remote testing). The tools developed in recent years to support remote tests exploit web technology based on HTML5 and JavaScript ES6 and thus enable previously unexplored scenarios. However, studies providing evidence on the benefits or drawbacks of utilizing recent web-based tools have not yet been reported in the literature. This article sheds some light on the impact of such tools on asynchronous remote usability testing of websites by reporting an experimental study with 100 participants and 15 evaluators to compare real-time laboratory tests with asynchronous remote tests. The study investigates: 1) how the metrics results of asynchronous remote usability tests performed through a web-based tool differ from those of usability tests conducted in real-time laboratory settings; and 2) how the experience of participants differs in the two types of tests. The lessons learned in the study are instrumental in informing the design of future tools. Some results of particular interest indicate that the web technology used by the tool for asynchronous remote testing affects task execution times and participants’ satisfaction. Another indication is that slow internet connections must be managed in asynchronous remote testing; slow connections introduce delays when transferring large amounts of collected data, which, together with the lack of human support, make participants of asynchronous remote tests more prone to feel negative emotions.

This demo presents SERENE, a Web platform for the UX semi-automatic evaluation of websites. It exploits Artificial Intelligence to predict visitors’ emotions starting from their interaction logs. The predicted emotions are shown by interactive heatmaps overlapped to the webpage to be analyzed. The concentration of negative emotions in a specific area of the webpage can help the UX experts identify UX problems.

In the framework of the AVI 2018 Conference, the interuniversity center ECONA has organized a thematic workshop on "Digital Interaction: where are we going?". Six contributions from the ECONA members investigate different perspectives around this thematic.

Planning Support Systems (PSS) are computer-based tools that assist professionals in land use planning activities. Although several researchers acknowledge the importance of such tools in planning practice, PSS use is limited due to their poor fit to users’ needs and expectations as well as to their low usability. This article presents a study carried out in three different countries, namely, Australia, Italy, and Switzerland, aiming at investigating in-depth the current situation regarding the adoption of PSS and identifying factors preventing their wider use, devoting particular attention to the quality of such systems from the point of view of their users. The study also aimed at analyzing planners’ expectations in order to identify relevant features that PSS should provide. The main part of the study consisted of 35 interviews with planning experts. A follow-up focus group with six further participants was also performed. The results confirmed some findings of previous studies but also revealed new insights. This article provides suggestions on how to address the emerging issues, as well as pathways for creating software that can be adopted and used with satisfaction in the planning practice.

The EFESTO platform allows the creation of interactive workspaces supporting end users in the exploration and seamless composition of heterogeneous data sources. By means of a visual paradigm implemented within a Web composition environment, the end users dynamically create "live" mashups where relevant information, extracted from different types of data sources including the Linked Open Data, and functions that can be performed on it can be flexibly shaped-up at runtime.

There is a huge and ever increasing amount of data sources available on the Web, which provide content through programmatic interfaces. Unfortunately, such data sources are accessible only through programming and therefore it is difficult for non-technical users to take advantage of such enormous data assets. The need therefore arises for paradigms to let laypeople, i.e., users without expertise in programming, explore and compose data sources. This paper discusses mechanisms for data source exploration and integration, which emerged from a study where laypeople were involved in discussions to gather their requirements about accessing and composing services. The paper also describes the prototypes that we defined to respond to the requirements highlighted by end users.

Large interactive displays are increasingly used in public spaces. Yet, it is still a challenge to understand how people behave when faced with such displays in their real life, not only when they are used for entertainment (or advertising), but also when they mediate more purposeful tasks. Do people feel shy? Are they willing to interact? Are they satisfied with the services offered and will they come back to use them again? To answer such questions, these systems have to be evaluated in the field so as to understand their actual impact on users in the real life. This paper first introduces an initial evaluation framework, aimed at highlighting some of the variables involved in understanding the impact of large display installations. Then, it applies the framework to analyze users' behavior and their experience with a large display installed at an international conference. Results highlighted that people showed greater interest in those services that, despite a lower appeal, supported them in carrying out useful tasks.

The importance of cultural heritage in forging a sense of identity is becoming increasingly evident. Information and communication technologies have a great potential to promote a greater awareness and appreciation of cultural heritage. This article presents some findings on how mobile technology can be used to foster a better understanding of an archaeological site by reconstructing the ancient environment and life. Children aged 11--13 years old are the target of our research. To motivate and engage them, a pervasive educational game has been developed and implemented in Explore! , a system aimed at supporting children exploring sites of cultural interest. Special attention has been devoted to the design of a soundscape that may improve players’ navigation in degraded physical environments and enrich their overall experience. A field study indicated that children judged their experience both useful and entertaining: not only did they enjoy playing the game, but they also learned historical notions and facts related to ancient Roman life. Contextual sounds were found to have a facilitating effect on space navigation, reducing the need for map reading and improving spatial orientation. This work provides insights into the design of educational games for use with cultural heritage and a model to enrich historical sites through the creation of soundscapes which can help visitors to navigate a site and feel its historical atmosphere.

The use of gameplay has been shown to be an excellent educational tool, especially if such games are supported by innovative and engaging technologies. This paper presents two new games implemented on a large multitouch screen, designed to support young students learning about historical sites like archaeological parks during school visits. Students are encouraged to collaborate to solve the proposed challenges, but they can also play against each other, since direct competition is known to be another way to stimulate and reinforce learning. We believe that such games can make visits to historical sites more effective and exciting

End-User Development (EUD) has traditionally been focusing on non-programmers tailoring or even creating software artifacts, often in organizational context. Some examples of successful EUD concepts include spreadsheet and word processing macros and the specification of e-mail filters by means of rules. Recent developments, such as Web 2.0 and Semantic Web, which enable end users to be contributors rather than just consumers of information on the WWW, have renewed interest in EUD research and applications. This trend is now moving from content and personalization to functionality in the direction of user-generated web services. Various on-going projects are already considering this new trend, but primarily from a technology perspective. The workshop aims at establishing a new forum for discussion and fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas among all the communities that can contribute to and benefit from allowing end users to generate web services: human-computer interaction, software engineering, artificial intelligence, computer-supported cooperative work and innovation management.

Cultural heritage assets keep alive the history of a territory and of its inhabitants. Several systems have been developed to support people during their visits to historical sites and museums, with the goal of improving the overall user experience. In many cases, people travelling together would appreciate the possibility of collaborating in gathering information and planning a personalized itinerary. Large sharable multitouch screens may offer this possibility. This paper is about ongoing research that is investigating possible applications of large multitouch screens in cultural heritage and tourism. In particular, an application is described, which aims at allowing tourists to get information about a territory and create itineraries for their visits by interacting together on a large screen.

Traditional visits to archaeological parks, which are usually organized by schools, tend to generate little interest in young students, especially when they are faced with the ruins of ancient settlements whose current appearance no longer reflects their initial purpose. We have designed Explore!, an m-learning system which allows students to visit the park while playing a game. By exploiting the imaging and multimedia capabilities of the latest generation cell phone, the game improves young visitors' experience. In particular, contextual sounds have been integrated to recreate the historical atmosphere: users can hear sounds generated by ancient people engaged in their daily activities. The slim architecture of the system absolves the archaeological park from any need to invest in hardware infrastructure. An Authoring Tool can be used by history experts to implement in Explore! games to be played in different parks. In this demo paper we briefly present the game and the main components of Explore!: 1) the Game Application running on cellular phones, to be used during the game, 2) the Master Application running on a notebook, used by the game master (i.e. a teacher) to perform a reflection phase, which follows the game and 3) the Authoring Tool to modify/create new games.

The ever increasing use of interactive software systems and the evolution of the World Wide Web into the so-called Web 2.0 determines the rise of new roles for users, who evolve from information consumers to information producers. The distinction between users and designers becomes fuzzy. Users are increasingly involved in the design and development of the tools they use, thus users and developers are not anymore two mutually exclusive groups of people. In this paper types of users that are between pure end users and software developers are analyzed. Some users take a very active role in shaping software tools to their needs, but they do it without being aware of programming, they are unwitting programmers who need appropriate development techniques and environments. A meta-design participatory approach for supporting unwitting end-user development through advanced visual systems is briefly discussed.

This paper reports the experimental studies we have performed to evaluate Explore!, an m-learning system that supports middle school students during a visit to an archaeological park. It exploits a learning technique called excursion-game, whose aim is to help students to acquire historical notions while playing and to make archaeological visits more effective and exciting. In order to understand the potentials and limitations of Explore!, our studies compare the experience of playing the excursion-game with and without technological support. The design and evaluation of Explore! have provided knowledge on the advantages and pitfalls of m-learning that may be instrumental in informing the current debate on e-learning.

This paper presents a novel participatory approach to the design of customized and tailorable visual interactive systems; it includes end users as domain experts in the design team. A design method is described which leads to two different visual specifications, one suitable for end users and the other suitable for software engineers. It is also shown how this second specification is directly mapped to the implementation architecture, based on XML technology. The discussion is supported by the description of an example in the mechanical engineering domain.

This paper presents a system designed to support young students learning history at an archaeological site, by exploiting mobile technology. The approach uses game-play, since it stimulates in young students an understanding of history that would otherwise be difficult to engender, helping players to acquire historical notions and making archaeological visits more effective and exciting. A strength of the system is that, by running on the visitors own cellular phones, it requires minimal investments and small changes to the existing site exhibition.

This paper is about the development of systems whose end users are professional people working in a specific domain (e.g., medicine, geology, mechanical engineering); they are expert in that domain, but not necessarily expert in nor even conversant with computer science. In several work organizations, end users need to tailor their software systems to better adapt them to their requirements and even to create or modify software artifacts. These are end-user development activities and are the focus of this paper. A model of the interaction between users and systems, which also takes into account their reciprocal coevolution during system usage, is discussed. This model is used to define a methodology aimed at designing software environments that allow end users to become designers of their own tools. The methodology is illustrated by discussing two experimental cases.

Interactive systems supporting people activities, even those designed for a specific application domain, should be very flexible, i. e., they should be easily adaptable to specific needs of the user communities. They should even allow users to personalize the system to better fit with their evolving needs. This paper presents an original model of the interaction and co-evolution processes occurring between humans and interactive systems and discusses an approach to design systems that supports such processes. The approach is based on the "artisan's workshop" metaphor and foresees the participatory design of an interactive system as a network of workshops customized to different user communities and connected one another by communication paths. Such paths allow end users and members of the design team to trigger and actuate the co-evolution. The feasibility of the methodology is illustrated through a case study in the medical domain.

PHiP (Patient History in Pocket) is a tool designed for a mobile device that displays patient histories and permits to visually query patient data stored in the hospital database. It exploits Information Visualization techniques and it is able to accommodate on the screen a good amount of information that physicians require in their analysis of clinical cases. Two different user interfaces for PHiP have been implemented and informal user testing has been performed to compare their impact on users.

DAE (data analysis engine) is a framework that provides various tools for data analysis, which can assist the users in their decision making process. The tools exploit visualizations techniques; various visualizations may be generated for a set of data in order to allow users to browse among data and get the information of interest as well as discover new and possibly unexpected insights. DAE is quite general and can manage data in different domains. It supports several activities involved in the data analysis process, starting from data selection, performing various data transformations and presenting the analysis results. DAE aims at giving decision makers the possibility to directly analyze data with different tools

Meta-design has been recently proposed as a technique for creating the socio-technical conditions empowering users to perform end-user development (EUD) activities. Current techniques and methodologies for designing interactive systems do not stress meta-design. In this paper, we show how the Software Shaping Workshop (SSW) methodology actually follows a meta-design approach in that the teams of designers, including end-user representatives, are supported in their reasoning on software design and development by software environments tailored to their needs, notations and experience.

Visual Languages for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) are a good basis for the development of software environments to be used by professional people such as engineers, geologists, medical doctors, etc. The research we have conducted, along with the experience we have gained working with these people, has compelled us to develop software environments that not only are easier to learn and use, but also allow their users to tailor them to their own needs, and to even create or modify software artifacts. The design methodology that we have developed is refined in this paper, giving insights emerging from our recent experiences, and emphasizing how it supports human centric-computing and end-user development.

It is indubitable that usability inspection of complex hypermedia is still an "art," in the sense that a great deal is left to the skills, experience, and ability of the inspectors. Training inspectors is difficult and often quite expensive. The Systematic Usability Evaluation (SUE) inspection technique has been proposed to help usability inspectors share and transfer their evaluation know-how, to simplify the hypermedia inspection process for newcomers, and to achieve more effective and efficient evaluation results. SUE inspection is based on the use of evaluation patterns, called abstract tasks, which precisely describe the activities to be performed by evaluators during inspection. This article highlights the advantages of this inspection technique by presenting its empirical validation through a controlled experiment. Two groups of novice inspectors were asked to evaluate a commercial hypermedia CD-ROM by applying the SUE inspection or traditional heuristic evaluation. The comparison was based on three major dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Results indicate a clear advantage of the SUE inspection over the traditional inspection on all dimensions, demonstrating that abstract tasks are efficient tools to drive the evaluator's performance.

The enormous amount of data available on the web must be adequately exploited by company managers in order to improve their business. An important role is played by various techniques that are capable of extracting useful information. Our approach exploits visualization techniques. In this paper we present 2D and 3D visualizations that are used in a web-based system that supports the organization and management of trade fairs. We show how the main users of the system, namely fair organisers and companies that participate in the fair either as exhibitors or visitors, take advantage of the available visual tools in their business activities.

Visual interaction processes are modeled in this paper as sequences of visual sentences in which for each visual sentence only a limited set of user actions is possible. We introduce the notion of "dynamic visual language" as a weakly ordered set of visual sentences characterized by the presence of common elements. We present a formal model of derivation of visual sentences in a dynamic visual language in which each visual sentence specifies the possible actions which can be performed on it and the possible transformations it can go through. In this way, we offer a formal setting in which the interaction process can be formally specified. A user interface can be derived from the formal specification, so that it embeds proper context elements which limit user disorientation. The concepts are illustrated by the user interaction with a prototype of a digital library developed at the University of Bari.

SUE inspection is a novel usability evaluation method for hypermedia, which falls into the category of inspection methods. Its primary goal is to favor a systematic usability evaluation (SUE), for supplying hypermedia usability inspectors with a structured flow of activities, allowing them to obtain more reliable, comparable, and cost-effective evaluation results. This is obtained especially due to the use of evaluation patterns, called abstract tasks (AT), which describe in details the activities that evaluators must carry out during inspection. AT helps share and transfer evaluation know-how among different evaluators, thus making it easier to learn the SUE inspection method by newcomers. A further notable advantage provided by the SUE inspection over other existent approaches is that it focuses on navigation and information structures, making evident some problems that other "surface-oriented" approaches might not reveal. This paper describes the SUE inspection for hypermedia. It also reports on a validation experiment, involving 28 evaluators, that has shown the major effectiveness and efficiency of the SUE inspection for hypermedia, with respect to traditional heuristic evaluation techniques.

In the usability inspection of complex hypermedia a great deal is left to the skills, experience, and ability of the inspectors. The SUE inspection technique has been proposed to help usability inspectors share and transfer their evaluation know-how, make it easier the hypermedia inspection process for newcomers, and achieve more effective and efficient evaluations. The SUE inspection is based on the use of evaluation patterns, called Abstract Tasks, which precisely describe the activities to be performed by evaluators during inspection. This paper presents an empirical validation of this inspection technique: two groups of novice inspectors have been asked to evaluate a commercial hypermedia CD-ROM applying the SUE inspection or the traditional heuristic evaluation technique. Results have shown a clear advantage of the SUE inspection over the heuristic evaluation, demonstrating that Abstract Tasks are efficient tools to drive evaluator's performance.

Computers are increasingly being seen not only as computing tools but more so as communication tools, thus placing special emphasis on human-computer interaction (HCI). In this article, the focus is on visual HCI, where the messages exchanged between human and computer are images appearing on the computer screen, as usual in current popular user interfaces. We formalize interactive sessions of a human-computer dialogue as a structured set of legal visual sentences, i.e., as a visual language, and show how rewriting systems can be generalized to specify both the pictorial and the computational aspects of visual languages. To this end, Visual Conditional Attributed Rewriting (VCARW) systems are introduced, and use for specification of visual languages. These specifications are given as inputs to a procedure illustrated in the article as a system of algorithms, which automatically generates control mechanisms of the interaction, thus favoring the design of more reliable and usable systems.

A novel definition of visual languages allows a uniform approach to satisfying the needs of visual reasoning faced in visual human-computer interaction. The way the machine associates a computational meaning with an image, and conversely, the way it generates an image on the screen from a computation are formally described. A definition of a visual sentence and of a visual language as a set of visual sentences is discussed. A hierarchy of visual languages is derived in relation to the requirements for intelligible, manageable and trustable interaction between humans and computers.

Describes an approach for multiparadigmatic visual access integration of different interaction paradigms. The user is provided with an adaptive interface augmented by a user model, supporting different visual representations of both data and queries. The visual representations are characterized on the basis of the chosen visual formalisms, namely forms, diagrams and icons. To access different databases, a unified data model called the "graph model" is used as a common underlying formalism to which databases, expressed in the most popular data models, can be mapped. Graph model databases are queried through the adaptive interface. The semantics of the query operations is formally defined in terms of graphical primitives. Such a formal approach permits us to define the concept of an "atomic query", which is the minimal portion of a query that can be transferred from one interaction paradigm to another and processed by the system. Since certain interaction modalities and visual representations are more suitable for certain user classes, the system can suggest to the user the most appropriate interaction modality as well as the visual representation, according to the user model. Some results on user model construction are presented.