Texting relies on screen-centric prompts designed for sighted users, still posing significant barriers to people who are blind and visually impaired (BVI). Can we re-imagine texting untethered from a visual display? In an interview study, 20 BVI adults shared situations surrounding their texting practices, recurrent topics of conversations, and challenges. Informed by these insights, we introduce TextFlow , a mixed-initiative context-aware system that generates entirely auditory message options relevant to the users’ location, activity, and time of the day. Users can browse and select suggested aural messages using finger-taps supported by an off-the-shelf finger-worn device without having to hold or attend to a mobile screen. In an evaluative study, 10 BVI participants successfully interacted with TextFlow to browse and send messages in screen-free mode. The experiential response of the users shed light on the importance of bypassing the phone and accessing rapidly controllable messages at their fingertips while preserving privacy and accuracy with respect to speech or screen-based input. We discuss how non-visual access to proactive, contextual messaging can support the blind in a variety of daily scenarios.

Texting relies on screen-centric prompts designed for sighted users, still posing significant barriers to people who are blind and visually impaired (BVI). Can we re-imagine texting untethered from a visual display? In an interview study, 20 BVI adults shared situations surrounding their texting practices, recurrent topics of conversations, and challenges. Informed by these insights, we introduce TextFlow: a mixed-initiative context-aware system that generates entirely auditory message options relevant to the users’ location, activity, and time of the day. Users can browse and select suggested aural messages using finger-taps supported by an off-the-shelf finger-worn device, without having to hold or attend to a mobile screen. In an evaluative study, 10 BVI participants successfully interacted with TextFlow to browse and send messages in screen-free mode. The experiential response of the users shed light on the importance of bypassing the phone and accessing rapidly controllable messages at their fingertips while preserving privacy and accuracy with respect to speech or screen-based input. We discuss how non-visual access to proactive, contextual messaging can support the blind in a variety of daily scenarios.

Accessible onscreen keyboards require people who are blind to keep out their phone at all times to search for visual affordances they cannot see. Is it possible to re-imagine text entry without a reference screen? To explore this question, we introduce screenless keyboards as aural flows (keyflows): rapid auditory streams of Text-To-Speech (TTS) characters controllable by hand gestures. In a study, 20 screen-reader users experienced keyflows to perform initial text entry. Typing took inordinately longer than current screen-based keyboards, but most participants preferred screen-free text entry to current methods, especially for short messages on-the-go. We model navigation strategies that participants enacted to aurally browse entirely auditory keyboards and discuss their limitation and benefits for daily access. Our work points to trade-offs in user performance and user experience for situations when blind users may trade typing speed with the benefit of being untethered from the screen.

Drug–drug interaction (DDI) alerts safeguard patient safety during medication prescribing, but are often ignored by physicians. Despite attempts to improve the usability of such alerts, physicians still mistrust the relevance of simplistic computerized warnings to support complex medical decisions. By building on prior fieldwork, this paper evaluates novel designs of trust–eliciting cues in DDI alerts. A sequential mixed-method study with 70 physicians examined what trust cues improve compliance, promote reflection, and trigger appropriate actions. In a survey, 52 physicians rated the likelihood of compliance and usefulness of redesigned alerts. Based on these findings, alerts were assessed in a scenario-based simulation with 18 physicians prescribing medications in 6 patient scenarios. Our results show that alerts embodying expert endorsement, awareness of prior actions, and peer advice were less likely to be overridden than current alerts, and promoted reflection, monitoring, or order modifications—thus building towards greater attention to patient safety.

Safe prescribing of medications relies on drug safety alerts, but up to 96% of such warnings are ignored by physicians. Prior research has proposed improvements to the design of alerts, but with limited increase in adherence. We propose a different perspective: before re-designing alerts, we focus on improving the trust between physicians and computerized advice by examining why physicians trust their medical colleagues. To understand trusted advice among physicians, we conducted three contextual inquiries in a hospital setting (22 participants), and corroborated our findings with a survey (37 participants). Drivers that guide physicians in trusting peer advice include: timeliness of the advice, collaborative language, empathy, level of specialization and medical hierarchy. Based on these findings, we introduce seven design directions for trust-based alerts: endorsement, transparency, team sensing, collaborative, empathic, conflict mitigating and agency laden. Our work contributes to novel alert design strategies to improve the effectiveness of drug safety advice.

To support mobile, eyes-free web browsing, users can listen to ‘playlists’ of web content— aural flows . Interacting with aural flows, however, requires users to select interface buttons, tethering visual attention to the mobile device even when it is unsafe (e.g. while walking). This research extends the interaction with aural flows through simulated voice commands as a way to reduce visual interaction. This paper presents the findings of a study with 20 participants who browsed aural flows either through a visual interface only or by augmenting it with voice commands. Results suggest that using voice commands reduced the time spent looking at the device by half but yielded similar system usability and cognitive effort ratings as using buttons. Overall, the low-cognitive effort engendered by aural flows, regardless of the interaction modality, allowed participants to do more non-instructed (e.g. looking at the surrounding environment) than instructed activities (e.g. focusing on the user interface).

Elicitation and evaluation studies investigated intuitiveness of touchless gestures but did not operationalize intuitiveness. For example, studies found that users fail to make accurate 3D strokes as interaction commands. But this phenomenon remains unexplained. In this paper, we first explain how making accurate 3D strokes is generally unintuitive, because it exceeds our sensorimotor knowledge. We then introduce motor-intuitive, touchless interaction that uses sensorimotor knowledge by relying on image schemas. Specifically, we propose an interaction primitive—mid-air, directional strokes—based on space schemas up–down and left–right. In a controlled study with large displays, we found that biomechanical factors affected directional strokes. Strokes were efficient (0.2 s) and effective (12.5|$^{\circ }$| angular error), but affected by directions and length. Our work operationalized intuitive touchless interaction using the continuum of knowledge in intuitive interaction, and demonstrated how user performance of a motor-intuitive, touchless primitive based on sensorimotor knowledge (image schemas) is affected by biomechanical factors.

Whereas glancing at a web page is crucial for navigation, screen readers force users to listen to content serially. This hampers efficient browsing of complex pages and maintains an accessibility divide between sighted and screen-reader users. To address this problem, we adopt a three-pronged strategy: (1) in a user study, we identified key page-level navigation problems that screen-reader users face while browsing a complex site; (2) through a crowd-sourcing system, we prioritized the most relevant sections of different page types necessary to support basic tasks; (3) we introduced DASX, a navigation approach that augments the ability of screen-reader users to "aurally glance" at a complex page by accessing at any time the most relevant page sections. In a preliminary evaluation, DASX markedly reduced the gap in page navigation efficiency between screen-reader and sighted users. Our contribution provides the groundwork for rethinking access strategies that strongly tie aural navigation to user's tasks.

Designing touchless control for six degrees of freedom (6DOF) input devices (e.g., Kinect®) is fundamental for natural user interfaces, but it raises unsolved challenges. These challenges stem from inherent limitations of human motor control in mid-air, and include undesirable jitter from continuous hand tremor, arm fatigue when traversing very large displays, and limited motor control on pixel-accurate selections. To address these problems, we contribute NUICursorTools, a nimble and flexible toolkit that provides a device-agnostic, driver- and middleware-agnostic solution that eliminates touchless cursor jitter, allows optimization of control-display gain and pointer acceleration for touchless control, and enables design of custom complex cursor behaviors. Due to its high-level, device-independent design, NUICursorTools has broad applicability for current and next- generation interaction contexts in which an onscreen cursor is indirectly controlled by any input device.

Researchers are exploring touchless interactions in diverse usage contexts. These include interacting with public displays, where mouse and keyboards are inconvenient, activating kitchen devices without touching them with dirty hands, or supporting surgeons in browsing medical images in a sterile operating room. Unlike traditional visual interfaces, however, touchless systems still lack a standardized user interface language for basic command selection (e.g., menus). Prior research proposed touchless menus that require users to comply strictly with system-defined postures (e.g., grab, finger-count, pinch). These approaches are problematic because they are analogous to command-line interfaces: users need to remember an interaction vocabulary and input a pre-defined symbol (via gesture or command). To overcome this problem, we introduce and evaluate Touchless Circular Menus (TCM)---a touchless menu system optimized for large displays, which enables users to make simple directional movements for selecting commands. TCM utilize our abilities to make mid-air directional strokes, relieve users from learning posture-based commands, and shift the interaction complexity from users' input to the visual interface. In a controlled study (N=15), when compared with contextual linear menus using grab gestures, participants using TCM were more than two times faster in selecting commands and perceived lower workload. However, users made more command-selection errors with TCM than with linear menus. The menu's triggering location on the visual interface significantly affected the effectiveness and efficiency of TCM. Our contribution informs the design of intuitive UIs for touchless interactions with large displays.

Our connection to the digital world relies on brands, but human–computer interaction research seems still detached from such crucial phenomenon. On the web, stakeholders and designers operate with the assumption that great user interfaces benefit the perception of the brand behind the system, yet understanding which design factors affect which aspects of the brand image remains a largely uncharted territory. To investigate this problem, we manipulated interface consistency and visual guidance of an anonymized university website and gauged the user perception (N=261) of three well-known branding constructs: brand as product, user image and brand personality. Unexpectedly, consistency did not significantly predict brand image, while the effect of visual guidance on brand perception showed a remarkable gender difference. When visual guidance was significantly worsened, females became much less satisfied with the university in terms of brand as product (teaching, research quality and student support) and user image (students' characteristics and social skills). In contrast, males' perceptions of the university's brand image stayed the same in most circumstances. The reason for this gender difference was revealed through a set of two-group path models, which inspires new research directions to unpack even more the nexus between branding and interaction design.

Navigating back and forth from a list of links (index) to its target pages is common on the web, but tethers screen-reader users to unnecessary cognitive and mechanical steps. This problem worsens when indexes lack information scent: cues that enable users to select a link with confidence during fact-finding. This paper investigates how blind users who navigate the web with screen-readers can bypass a scentless index with guided tours: a much simpler browsing pattern that linearly concatenates items of a collection. In a controlled study (N=11) at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (ISBVI), guided tours lowered user's cognitive effort and significantly decreased time-on-task and number of pages visited when compared to an index with poor information scent. Our findings suggest that designers can supplement indexes with guided tours to benefit screen-reader users in a variety of web navigation contexts.

Existing web applications force users focus their visual attention on mobile devices while browsing content and services while on the go. To support eyes-free, mobile experiences, designers can minimize interaction with a device by leveraging the auditory channel. Whereas acoustic interfaces have proven to be effective in reducing visual attention, a perplexing challenge is designing aural information architectures for the web. To address this problem, techniques to remodel existing information architectures as linear, aural flows were introduced and evaluated. Mobile web browsing with aural flows is exemplified in ANFORA News, a semiaural mobile site designed to browse large collections of news stories. An exploratory study involving frequent news readers (n = 20) investigated the usability and navigation experience with ANFORA News in a mobile setting. Initial evidence suggests that aural flows are a promising paradigm to support eyes-free mobile navigation while on the go, but users still require assistance and additional learning to fully master the aural mechanics of the flows while on the go. Future work will improve on the mechanisms to customize content and control the aural navigation.

When screen reader users need to back track pages to re-find previously visited content, they are forced to listen to some portion of each unwanted page to recognize it. This makes aural back navigation inefficient, especially on large websites. To address this problem, we introduce topic- and list-based back: two navigation strategies that provide back browsing shortcuts by leveraging the conceptual structure of content-rich websites. Both are manifested in Webtime, an accessible website on the history of the Web. A controlled study (N=10) conducted at the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired compared topic- and list-based back to traditional back mechanisms while participants completed fact-finding tasks. Topic- and list-based back significantly decreased time-on-task and number of backtracked pages; the navigation shortcuts were also associated with positive improvements in perceived cognitive effort and navigation experience. The proposed strategies can operate as a supplement to current back mechanisms in information-rich websites.

Mobile web navigation requires highly-focused visual attention, which poses problems when it is inconvenient or distracting to continuously look at the screen (e.g., while walking). Aural interfaces support more eyes-free experiences, as users can primarily listen to the content and occasionally look at the device. Yet, designing aural information architectures remains a challenge. Specifically, back navigation is inefficient in the aural setting, as it forces users to listen to each previous page to retrieve the desired content. This paper introduces topic- and list-based back: two navigation strategies to enhance aural browsing. Both are manifest in Green-Savers Mobile (GSM), an aural mobile site. A study (N=29) compared both solutions to traditional back mechanisms. Our findings indicate that topic- and list-based back enable faster access to previous pages, improve the navigation experience and reduce perceived cognitive load. The proposed designs apply to a wide range of content-intensive, ubiquitous web systems.

Existing perceived usability questionnaires detect the appearance of usability issues rather than the underlying design generating those issues. This limits the capability of existing instruments to directly inform design recommendations. To address this problem, a usability questionnaire structured around the analytical composition of the design was created and validated. A four-stage process was followed. First, 3 usability experts refined 54 questions from highly cited usability questionnaires and structured them around 6 design dimensions. Second, 12 raters scored the questions by their relevance to assess usability. Third, questions and dimensions were then improved through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis (N = 196) and, fourth, further enhanced through confirmatory factor analysis (N = 362). The result is DEEP, a 19-question usability questionnaire based on 5 main design dimensions (content, information architecture, navigation, layout, and visual guidance). DEEP can be used to capture detailed usability feedback that more directly relates to specific aspects of design requirements.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) technologies offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction and navigation in ways that allow web engineers to share through a common vocabulary, as well as sketch, to explore and specify design decisions at the light of usability requirements and stakeholder's goals. To meet this challenge, we codify a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of RIA. We demonstrate through a case study the promising advantages of our approach: expressiveness to capture interactive features at a high level of abstraction, semi-formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engineers, and traceability of the design to important usability requirements.

Does usability of a web-based communication artifact affect brand, i.e., the set of beliefs, emotions, attitudes, or qualities that people mentally associate to the entity behind that artifact? Intuitively, the answer is “yes”: usability is a fundamental aspect of the quality of the experience with a website, and a “good” experience with a “product” or its reifications tends to translate into “good” brand perception. To date, however, the existence of a connection between web usability and brand perception is shown through anecdotic arguments, and is not supported by published systematic research. This paper discusses a study that empirically investigates this correlation in a more rigorous, analytical, and replicable way. Our main contribution is twofold: on the one hand, we provide empirical evidence to the heuristic principle that web usability influences branding, and we do that through four between subjects controlled experiments that involved 120 subjects. On the other hand, we inform the study with a systematic value-oriented approach to the user experience, and thus provide a conceptual framework that can be reused in other experimental settings, either for replicating our study, or for designing similar studies focusing on the correlation of web branding vs. design factors other than usability.

MOTIVATION: Improving the usability of bioinformatics resources enables researchers to find, interact with, share, compare and manipulate important information more effectively and efficiently. It thus enables researchers to gain improved insights into biological processes with the potential, ultimately, of yielding new scientific results. Usability 'barriers' can pose significant obstacles to a satisfactory user experience and force researchers to spend unnecessary time and effort to complete their tasks. The number of online biological databases available is growing and there is an expanding community of diverse users. In this context there is an increasing need to ensure the highest standards of usability. RESULTS: Using 'state-of-the-art' usability evaluation methods, we have identified and characterized a sample of usability issues potentially relevant to web bioinformatics resources, in general. These specifically concern the design of the navigation and search mechanisms available to the user. The usability issues we have discovered in our substantial case studies are undermining the ability of users to find the information they need in their daily research activities. In addition to characterizing these issues, specific recommendations for improvements are proposed leveraging proven practices from web and usability engineering. The methods and approach we exemplify can be readily adopted by the developers of bioinformatics resources.

An infosuasive web application is mainly intended to be at the same time informative and persuasive, i.e., it aims at supporting knowledge needs and it has also the (declared or not declared) goal of influencing user's opinions, attitudes and behaviors. Most web applications, in fact, are infosuasive (except those whose aim is mainly operational). In this paper, we investigate the complex set of elements that informs the very early design of infosuasive web applications. We propose a conceptual framework aimed at supporting the actors involved in this process to integrate their different viewpoints, to organize the variety of issues that need to be analyzed, to find a direction in the numerous design options, and to represent the results of this activity in an effective way.

Requirements engineering has traditionally focused on identifying functional and non functional requirements to inform design, and to ensure that the product under development accommodates the needs of the end users, the goals of the different stakeholders, as well as the technological, organizational, and business constraints. For requirements analysis of content-intensive interactive applications, we propose to take a wider perspective driven by the concepts of brand, brand value, and communication goal. We highlight the pervasive impact of this kind of "non functional requirements" on various design dimensions of content-intensive interactive applications - contents, lay-out, information architecture, interaction, services - in order to create not only a functional or informative experience, but also an emotional relationship with the artifact and the brand underneath it. The paper discuss a case study to exemplify our approach, sets the founding elements for brand&communication-driven requirements analysis in content-intensive interactive applications, and provides a modeling framework for representing the results of this process.

This special issue features extended versions of selected papers from the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Web Site Evolution (WSE 2006) that was held in Philadelphia PA, on 23-24 September 2006.The symposium was co-located with the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2006).Since its inception in 1999, the Web Site Evolution (WSE) series of events have provided a forum for researchers and practitioners from the communities of Software Maintenance and Evolution and Web Engineering to present original work and discuss subjects related to the disciplined evolution of large-scale Web sites.Researchers and practitioners working in the areas of Web application design, development, maintenance, and evolution attend WSE to discuss results and exchange experiences about models, methods, tools, and technologies related to the above-mentioned areas.In particular, the last editions of WSE have represented a significant step in making the WSE community more and more interdisciplinary, building bridges with various areas such as communication, HCI, usability, and quality and maintenance.We wish to maintain and enrich this multi-faceted spirit of the community, as well as to reach and involve other researchers and practitioners in this effort.WSE began as a one-day workshop, but, thanks to the success in terms of attendance and number of submissions, in 2006 it expanded into a two-day symposium to include keynote presentations, technical sessions, working sessions, and panels discussions.Out of 31 submissions, 13 excellent papers were selected to be presented at the symposium.The accepted papers covered a broad range of topics of the whole life cycle of Web systems, from design to implementation, evaluation, and maintenance, including: Modeling and Architecture, Web Trends and Technology, Accessibility and User Behavior, Comprehension, Testing and Security.The WSE 2006 program also included two inspiring keynotes: 'Model Driven Evolution of Network-Centric Applications: Perspectives, Applications, and Issues' by Kostas Kontogiannis, and 'Knowing Your Online Readership, Organizing Your Communication' by Lorenzo Cantoni.After the symposium, five outstanding papers were selected by the program chairs for invitation to this special issue of the Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice.The authors of the selected papers were asked to prepare a significant extension on the symposium version of their papers.Each paper underwent a rigorous reviewing process, involving three independent reviewers and two rounds of revisions.Eventually, four papers were accepted for inclusion in this special issue, covering four different topics of Web systems maintenance and evolution: Comprehension, Testing, Empirical Studies, and Patterns.During Web application re-engineering, a common activity is to identify similar content located in different static and dynamically generated Web pages, so that the content can be more effectively reused.The paper 'Identifying Similar Pages of Web Applications using a Competitive Clustering

Multichannel applications deliver the same content and a "similar interactive experience" using different devices and different technologies(e.g., web sites, palm held devices, car navigators, or interactive TVs). Various channels imply a number of differences, including screen (size), keyboard(size), pointing devices, output devices, performances, and the context of use (standing, sitting, walking, etc.). In most cases, today, applications for different channels are designed and implemented almost "independently", with ineffectiveness for the developers (high costs) and ineffectiveness for the users (loss of consistency across the different channels and the perception that they are "different applications"). This paper presents an interactive dialogue model (IDM), a novel design model specifically tailored for multichannel applications. The background research, moving from linguistic theories and practices, has led us to the development of a "channel-independent" design model (based on dialogue primitives). Design can start in a "conceptual", channel-independent fashion, and then proceed into a further "logical" design oriented toward specific channels of communication. Designing an interactive application in two steps (channel-independent first, and channel-dependent later) allows a number of advantages without making more cumbersome the overall design process. Beside the emphasis on multichannel, IDM has additional distinctive features: it is lightweight, providing a few set of primitives (and a simple graphic notation) which are easy to learn and teach. Moreover, it is suitable for brainstorming and generating ideas at early stage during design (or during the shift from requirements to design); finally, it is cost-effective (it requires little effort from designers) and modular (designers can take the part they wish, not being forced to "all or nothing"). IDM has been validated both in the academic and industry environments,providing excellent results so far.

In this paper we recount the experience and the lessons we learned trying to use concretely and in-depth a requirements engineering method (called AWARE) combined with a conceptual user-centered design method (called W2000) for the development of the institutional Web site of the Superior Council for Public Works of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transportation in Italy. The project is framed within its contractual context, and discussed through the process followed and the artifacts produced during requirements analysis and design. Lessons learned are depicted from a twofold perspective. From the one side they crystallize insights from the research experience of using and transferring the methods to industry, suggesting practical and methodological recommendations. From the other they express what a medium-size software company has experienced trying to use academic methods.

Requirements analysis for Web applications still needs to employ effective RE practices to accommodate some distinctive aspects: capturing high-level communication goals, considering several user profiles, defining hypermedia-specific requirements, and reusing requirements for an effective usability evaluation. Techniques should be usable, informal, require little training effort, and show relative advantage to project managers. Starting from the i* framework, we present a proposal for defining hypermedia requirements (concerning aspects such as content, navigation and presentation) for Web applications. The model adopts a goal-driven approach coupled with scenario-based techniques, introduces a hypermedia requirement taxonomy to facilitate Web conceptual design, and paves the way for systematic usability evaluation. Particular attention is paid to the empirical validation of the model based on the perceived quality attributes theory. A case study developed with industrial partners is discussed.

Task analysis has been used traditionally in HCI and CSCW to define requirements for user interfaces, Web-based or otherwise. This paper argues that a shift of paradigm is needed in Web engineering from task-oriented to goal-oriented approaches for designing applications delivering a quality user experience and achieving the objectives of the stakeholders. Task models focus on fine-grained and precisely defined user needs, thereby risking a commitment to premature design decisions. Moreover, since task analysis focuses on users doing things with the system, tasks do not capture the goals of other stakeholders who are not users. Goal-oriented methods, on the other hand, provide specific support for coping with high-level users' and stakeholders' goals, facilitates the exploration of design alternatives and the definition of requirements at a suitable level of abstraction. As such, goal-based techniques are more suitable for early stages of requirements analysis; task models can be used for later stages, such as detailed interaction design and usability evaluation. The paper conducts a detailed comparison of task and goal-analysis design techniques, using an ongoing project for a museum Web site to illustrate the two techniques and their relative strengths.