My research has led me to encounter a series of interesting reactions of people when interacting with visual, physical or logical representations. Such reactions are sometimes predicted or assumed, but many of them are rather eye-opening for me if not mystical. I could reason about such reactions most of the time but the more I encounter such cases, the more I got enchanted by the wonder of human perception and cognition. People get attentive or inattentive, motivated or discouraged, feeling challenged or appreciative, respectful or disrespectful, obedient or disobedient, or excited or bored, not through the functionality that designed interactions convey. It is what people perceive and make sense out of the interactions as the consequence, influence, or effect of the interactions.

The design and development of a software system deals with both the world of making and that of using. The world of making is concerned with molding, constructing and building. The world of using is concerned with engaging, experiencing, and interacting-with. The two worlds are structurally, semantically, and temporally intertwined through software.

Studies have shown that programmers frequently seek external information during programming, from source code and documents, as well as from other programmers because much of the information remains in the heads of programmers. Programmers therefore often ask other programmers questions to seek information in a timely fashion to carry out their work. This information seeking entails several conflicting factors. From the perspective of the information-seeking programmer, not asking questions degrades productivity. Conversely, asking questions interrupts other programmers and degrades their productivity, and may be frowned upon by peers due to the perceived social inconsideration of the information seeker. From the perspective of the recipients of the question, even though helping is costly, not helping also incurs social costs due to the deviation from social norms. To balance all these factors, this paper proposes the STeP_IN (Socio-Technical Platform for In situ Networking) framework to guide the design of systems that support information seeking during different phases of programming. The framework facilitates access to the information in the heads of other programmers while minimizing the negative impacts on the overall productivity of the team.

Creativity support tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower users to be not only more productive but also more innovative. Potential users include software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, architects, educators, students, and many others. Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in hypothesis formation, speedier evaluation of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results. For creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (e.g., computer programs, scientific papers, engineering diagrams, symphonies, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking. This U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored workshop brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences, identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Two key outcomes emerged: (a) encouragement to evaluate creativity support tools through multidimensional in-depth longitudinal case studies and (b) formulation of 12 principles for design of creativity support tools.

Our approach to better understand the nature of collaboration in open-source software (OSS) development is to view it as a participative system, where people and artifacts are inter-connected via a computational infrastructure demonstrating a socio-technical system. This paper presents a framework we have developed to describe a participative system, and discusses our hypothesis that the framework is capable of characterizing the evolution of an OSS community through changing the participants' perceived value and types of engagement. We report a preliminary result of our case study on the GIMP development mailing list as an initial step to test this hypothesis.

The complexity of many problems necessitates creating and exploring multiple, alternative solutions. However, current user interfaces do not cleanly support creating alternatives at a time when they are likely to be discovered: as users interactively modify data. This paper presents Parallel Paths, a novel model of interaction that facilitates generating, manipulating, and comparing alternative solutions. In contrast to existing approaches such as automated history capture tools, Parallel Paths emphasizes the active, simultaneous development of multiple, alternative solutions. We demonstrate this model of interaction in Parallel Pies, a user interface mechanism developed for image manipulation tasks that allows users to: easily create solution alternatives as they interact with a command; embed the alternatives in the same workspace; manipulate the alternatives independently or simultaneously as if they were the same object; and perform side-by-side comparisons of each. Results from an initial evaluation are presented, along with implications for future designs.

The theme and title for this panel is inspired by Donald Schon's writings about the reflective practitioner in which he describes professional practice as being a process of reflection in action. Ill-defined problems including design decisions lead to breakdowns, which become opportunities for reflection and modification of practice. This panel seeks to provide ICSE attendees with a broad cross section of the history, state of the art, and open issues with some of the methods and tools directed at supporting reflective software practitioners.

We have developed a series of tools, which use spatial positioning of objects as a means of externalizations in designing linear information. They include a tool for collage-style writing, a tool for notes summarization, a tool for multimedia data analysis, and a tool for movie editing. With these tools, linear information design is viewed as a concurrent process of framing parts and determining the order of the parts. In designing these tools, visual interaction design has been a center of our project. Our design priority has been put in minimizing the user's cognitive load in creating and modifying parts in a space, and manipulating them in the space. This paper first presents a brief philosophy underneath the system development, and describes interaction techniques used in the tools, such as how a user distinguishes objects positioned in the space, how a user resizes the space by dragging objects toward one of its edges, and how a user sees a trajectory of the objects the user is moving in the space.

This paper reports our case study on an ongoing interaction-design-centered software development project (ART project) viewed as an evolutionary collective creative process. In this project, a visual interaction designer and an expert programmer have collaboratively produced a series of interactive software tools, including a various types of movie players, innovative 3D visualizations and application systems. Visual interaction design is viewed as a process of seeking for compromises between what are desirable (expressed by the designer) and what are possible (expressed by the programmer). In the collaboration, each of the designer and the programmer collects, represents, interacts with, and reflects on a various types of visual representations. This paper characterizes the visual interaction design task, presents our framework to analyze the creative processes, and reports in detail how their creative processes have been carried out.

Jun is a large open-source graphics and multimedia library. It is object-oriented and supports 3D geometry, topography and multimedia. This paper reviews the development of the Jun library from five perspectives: open-source, software evolution processes, development styles, technological support, and development data. It concludes with lessons learned from the perspective of a for-profit company providing open-source object-oriented software to the community.

The goal of this research is to study the role and effects of the use of animated information visualization in the early stages of exploratory data analysis tasks. Despite the existence of a large body of research on information visualization, there is little known regarding how and when one should use and how to interact with animated visualization to help explore data. By animated visualization, we mean a type of information visualization technique that produces autonomous motions of representations. This research explored the issue from two aspects: what cognitive effects animated information visualization has, and what interactions people have with animated visualization when exploring data. We conducted two user studies to investigate each aspect, and identified research challenges for designing an interactive animated information visualization environment that supports the early stages of exploratory data analysis. These findings help us further study how to extend the notions developed in spatial visualization to temporal visualization - e.g. what focus+context means when applied to the time dimension in animated visualization.

The goal of our research is to develop computer systems that support designers' collective creativity; such systems support individual creative aspects in design through the use of representations created by others in the community. We have developed two systems, IAM-eMMa and EVIDII, that both aim at supporting designers in finding visual images that would be useful for their creative design task. IAMeMMa uses knowledge-based rules, which are constructed by other designers, to retrieve images related to a design task and infers the underlying "rationale" when a designer chooses one of the images. EVIDII allows designers to associate affective words and images, and then shows several visual representations of the relationships among designers, images and words. By observing designers interacting with the two systems, we have identified that systems for supporting collective creativity need to be based on design knowledge that (1) is contextualized, (2) is respectable and trustful, and (...

Empirical software engineering can be viewed as a series of actions to obtain knowledge and a better understanding about some aspects of software development, given a set of problem statements in the form of issues, questions or hypotheses. Experience has made us aware of the criticality of integrating the various types of data that are collected and analyzed as well as the criticality of integrating the various types of activities that take place, such as experiment design and the experiment itself. This has led us to develop a Computer-Aided Empirical Software Engineering (CAESE) framework to support the empirical software engineering lifecycle. The paper first presents the CAESE framework that consists of three elements: (1) a process model for the "lifecycle" of empirical software engineering studies, including needs analysis, experiment design, actual experimentation, and analyzing and packaging results; (2) a model that helps empirical software engineers decide how to look at the "world" to be studied in a coherent manner; (3) an architecture, based on which CAESE environments can be built, consisting of tool sets for each phase of the process model, a process management mechanism, and the two types of integration mechanism that are vital for handling multiple types of data: data integration and control integration. Next, the paper describes the Ginger2 environment as an instantiation of our framework. It concludes with reports on case studies using Ginger2, which dealt with a variety of empirical data types including mouse and keystrokes, eye traces, 3D movement, skin resistance level, and videotaped data.

Software organizations and projects need guidance on how to improve software process, not just guidelines on what to improve. Several surveys demonstrate that the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and ISO-9000 only provide the latter. We report our in-depth analysis on a seventeen-month effort in software process improvement (SPI) at OMRON Corporation. The goal of the analysis was to identify issues and challenges of SPI and to design a step-wise practical method to avoid such problems. Major problems we have found include the lack of shared goal among stakeholders, insufficient understanding of the current progress of SPI efforts, and underutilization of a large amount of complex information generated during SPI. We present the method for software organizations and projects for dealing with the problems, and argue for a knowledge-based SPI support system based on the method.

Although object oriented languages can help make software more reusable, class libraries can be difficult to use unless the programmer knows the library well. In particular, it can be hard to find and understand components that a programmer may want to reuse. The article focuses on novice programmers solving programming tasks which require the reuse of components. We take an in-depth look at how the programmers find the necessary components, and identify strategies that they use to achieve it. We also comment on the type of tool that is necessary from the viewpoint of the strategies.

Based on the capability maturity model (CMM), process improvement at OMRON, a Japanese microprocessor manufacturer, increased project predictability in three ways: accuracy, variability, and performance. The authors use the project visibility index (PVI) and other measurements to quantitatively demonstrate this. Qualitative analysis of how and why OMRON achieved higher project visibility and increases in the QCD (quality, cost, and delivery on time) factors are supported with data on review-effort ratios and productivity. They identify factors directly affected by high project visibility.

Article Using computational critics to facilitate long-term collaboration in user interface design Share on Authors: Uwe Malinowski Siemens Corporate R&D ZFE ST SN 5D 81730 München, Germany Siemens Corporate R&D ZFE ST SN 5D 81730 München, GermanyView Profile , Kumiyo Nakakoji Software Research Associates Inc., Software Engineering Lab. 1-1-1 Hirakawa-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102, Japan and Department of Comp. Science University of Colorad, Boulder, CO Software Research Associates Inc., Software Engineering Lab. 1-1-1 Hirakawa-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102, Japan and Department of Comp. Science University of Colorad, Boulder, COView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '95: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsMay 1995 Pages 385–392https://doi.org/10.1145/223904.223954Online:01 May 1995Publication History 3citation332DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads332Last 12 Months4Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Object-oriented (OO) technology has been heralded as a solution to the problems of software engineering. The claims are that OO technology promotes understandability, extensibility, evolvabilty, reusability, and maintainability of systems and that OO systems are easy to understand and use. However, this technology has not been as successful as expected. An analysis of experiences and empirical studies reveals that the problem is not the technology per se but that the technology provides no support to software developers in performing the processes the technology requires. We present a cognitive model of software development that details the challenges software developers face in using OO technology. The model focuses on three aspects of software development—evolution, reuse and redesign, and domain orientation. We motivate this model with a variety of firsthand experiences and use it to assess current OO technology. Further, we present tools and evaluations that substantiate parts of this model. The model and tools indicate directions for future software development environment, looking beyond the technological possibilities of OO languages and beyond the context of individual developers and projects.

An approach that embeds human-computer cooperative problem-solving tools into knowledge-based design environments that work in conjunction with human software designers in specific application domains is described. This human-centered approach takes advantage of peoples' ability to understand and incrementally reformulate their problems, while allowing them to contribute to the gradual improvement of the underlying knowledge base. The notion of evolution circumvents the inability of the original builders of a design environment to anticipate all future needs and knowledge for complete coverage of a domain. The access and development of knowledge is supported in a cycle of location, comprehension, and modification. Modification includes the evolution of the knowledge base and tools. A framework for building such tools and mechanisms is described and illustrated in terms of three systems: CATALOGEXPLORER, EXPLAINER, and MODIFIER. User studies of these systems demonstrate the promise and the limitations of the design environment approach.>