When working in distributed teams, it is very important to be aware of the activities of all members, since it provides hints about when they might be available for collaboration. We propose a novel visualization technique that combines several representations to show the daily patterns of team members' activities. It uses a 24 hours circular display to facilitate international collaboration across time zones. Current calendar information can be compared to the typical patterns and reveal likely availability. User studies evaluating the tool that implements the proposed technique are reported and discussed.

Collaboration today is often done among people from different countries located in different time zones. Even if daily activity patterns are very similar, the displacement of the time of the day, due to the time zone can reduce the possibilities to have a meeting or contact a collaborator. This paper proposes a visualization technique that shows to different users the activity patterns of collaborator in order to improve the awareness in the team. The representation shows several data types in a 24h clock metaphor. The information conveyed discussed in the paper are email, instant messaging, presence at the computer, scheduled activities in a time windows of 24h, which can be extended to 48h.

Emission inventories are useful tools in air quality management policies. In the framework of Apulia Region (South of Italy) inventory, the Territorial Emission Cadastre (CET) was developed. CET stores the huge amount of data concerning industrial plants. In order to easily interact with input data and analyze them, a graphical user interface that includes a GIS (Geographical Information System) component was integrated (CETGIS). This paper focuses on the development of CETGIS and analysis possibilities provided by GIS technology, which allow decision makers to monitor the state of air quality and to evaluate the targets to be achieved.

One of the main reasons of domestic energy waste is due to occu- pants’ habits, since they are often not aware of the energy they are consuming. This paper presents a low cost system for home energy consumption awareness. The first prototype considers electrical energy and uses only two sensors: one to monitor energy produced by solar panels and one to monitor consumed energy. A visualization shows people their consumption patterns in order to make them aware of energy consumption and change their habits to save energ

This paper describes the experience in designing and developing the CET system according to user-centred and participatory approaches. CET is a web-based system used by industries and experts of the regional government that monitor air quality. With CET, industries can officially declare their pollutant emissions in the atmosphere, while air quality experts can easily visualize how the industries are distributed in the regional territory, the type and quantity of emis- sions coming from their production processes and other important information to support their decision-making process. The experience provides hints about proper user involvement for designing successful systems.

This paper analyzes how User-Centred Design (UCD) has been carried out in the creation of a web-based system, whose aim is monitoring air quality for sustainable industrial development. This distributed multimedia system has been commissioned by the Puglia region and it is used primarily by industries and regional government experts. Several lessons are learned from this analysis and hints about the effective application of UCD and the fruitful involvement of users for creating usable systems are derived.

Developing visual tools that support data analysis in a specific application domain requires a careful investigation in order to understand needs and expectations of people who will use such tools. The domain experts addressed in this paper are chemists specialized in environmental data analysis. Their main activity is to detect and monitor chemical compounds in the air through many devices in order to detect anomalies or prevent risks. One of the main problems that chemists face is the analysis of the huge amount of data produced by devices. They perform explorative data analysis and are willing to use software tools that can help them to get insights from data. This paper reports the experience in working with chemists to identify interactive visual tools that can be useful for their purposes. It provides insights on the difficulty of creating systems that users find really useful for their work, even when users participate in the design team. Because of the complexity of the considered problem and the fact that people are unable to make explicit all their needs and requirements, the identification of proper tools resulted very challenging.

Atmospheric emission inventories are useful tools to support informed decision making in air quality management. In the framework of Apulia Region emission inventory, a tool for the industrial atmospheric emission management called Territorial Emissions Cadastre (CET) was developed. CET is a Web-based system able to store all data related to the industrial plants and to perform spatial queries; its components are used for synchronizing, exporting and querying the underlined database. CET also enables access to information that is useful to support air quality monitoring experts in their decision-making process. An innovative feature of CET is CETGE. It allows the users to visualize the industrial plants and the associated emissions in Google Earth® which provides an effective tool to display the most relevant industrial emission sources on a Regional area view. CETGE can be used by the stakeholders to evaluate and present alternative solutions for areas characterized by high impact emission sources.

Understanding how technology, coupled with skillful pedagogical solutions, can help to innovate and improve learning at school is the main goal of the “Learning for All” (L4A) research project. The combination of educational games and advanced technology has the potentiality of arousing pupils’ attention, also engaging them in learning activities while having fun. This paper presents two educational games available through a large multitouch displays installed in the hall of a primary school. Such games aim at stimulating pupils to exercise their knowledge about history and geography. Field studies have been planned to study both educational and social aspects about the interaction with such games.

Integration of human-centered design in a company’s software development requires a thorough analysis of its current practices by both researchers and practitioners.

Developing visual tools that support data analysis in a specific application domain requires a careful investigation in order to understand needs and expectations of people who will use such tools. The domain experts addressed in this paper are chemists specialized in environmental data analysis. Their main activity is to detect and monitor chemical compounds in the air through many devices in order to detect anomalies or prevent risks. One of the main problems that chemists face is the analysis of the huge amount of data produced by devices. They perform explorative data analysis and are willing to use software tools that can help them to get insights from data. This paper reports the experience in working with chemists to identify interactive visual tools that can be useful for their purposes. It provides insights on the difficulty of creating systems that users find really useful for their work, even when users participate in the design team. Because of the complexity of the considered problem and the fact that people are unable to make explicit all their needs and requirements, the identification of proper tools resulted very challenging.

Large interactive displays are increasingly placed in public (or semi-public) locations, including museums, shops, various city settings and offices. This article discusses the evolution of such displays by looking at their use and analyzing how they are changing the concept of human-computer interaction through new modalities. By surveying the literature on systems using these displays, relevant features were identified and used as classification dimensions. The analysis provided may inform the design and development of future installations. A discussion on research challenges concludes the article.

The efforts of addressing user experience (UX) in product development keep growing, as demonstrated by the proliferation of workshops and conferences bringing together academics and practitioners, who aim at creating interactive software able to satisfy their users. This special issue focuses on "Interplay between User Experience Evaluation and Software Development", stating that the gap between human-computer interaction and software engineering with regard to usability has somewhat been narrowed. Unfortunately, our experience shows that software development organizations perform few usability engineering activities or none at all. Several authors acknowledge that, in order to understand the reasons of the limited impact of usability engineering and UX methods, and to try to modify this situation, it is fundamental to thoroughly analyze current software development practices, involving practitioners and possibly working from inside the companies. This article contributes to this research line by reporting an experimental study conducted with software companies. The study has confirmed that still too many companies either neglect usability and UX, or do not properly consider them. Interesting problems emerged. This article gives suggestions on how they may be properly addressed, since their solution is the starting point for reducing the gap between research and practice of usability and UX. It also provides further evidence on the value of the research method, called Cooperative Method Development, based on the collaboration of researchers and practitioners in carrying out empirical research; it has been used in a step of the performed study and has revealed to be instrumental for showing practitioners why to improve their development processes and how to do so.

Cultural heritage provides a great legacy that more and more people should experience and appreciate. Information and communication technologies may contribute to increasing awareness in cultural heritage. In the last few years we have developed several applications aimed at supporting visits to cultural heritage sites. Such applications depends very much on the visitors they address, the devices they are implemented on, etc. In this paper, we illustrate the design approach we have adopted, which takes into account an end-user development perspective in order to allow different stakeholders to contribute to the design. The Cultural Heritage Resources (CHeR) model, encompassing all the entities involved in the design process, including the stakeholders, the digital resources to be shown, the different types of visitors, the relationships between these entities is described. It is at the basis of a software framework that has been developed to allow different stakeholders to contribute in the design of the final application. It is shown how this framework is used to create engaging applications in cultural heritage.

More and more people look for online information about the desired travel destinations. While well-known destinations have plenty of information and recommendations, minor cultural sites are not easily identifiable: if we search for 'ipogeo' (in English ‘hypogeum’: from Greek hypógheios, it is an ancient underground construction, mostly used as a tomb – source: Wikipedia), thousands of results are found in Google while only three in Europeana map – perhaps in both cases, it turns out to be simply a waste of time. The so-called 'Recommender Systems' have been developed to cope with this problem; however, they require a considerable amount of data, so new destinations are rarely promoted having no ratings. A subset of such systems are the 'Travel Advisor Systems', working mainly in the field of hotel services - usually there is a 'thing to do' section containing places suggested by users, with the result of converging on well-known destinations. A review of some systems also showed the presence of errors in localizing cultural destinations – among others: Italian Touring Club, World Heritage Map and TripAdvisor (fig.1). There is the need for a system that provides people with authoritative and correctly localized information, an equivalent of ‘TripAdvisor’ which, instead of hotel facilities, focuses attention on cultural attractors, including less known sites. To this aim, we are designing 'MU.S.A. - Must See Advisor', a tool able to assist people in finding places that suit their needs and which would allow them to provide and share comments, through a database built progressively with the contribution of different stakeholders (i.e. tourists, touristic operators, public entities). The system will focus on two main aspects: - 'Knowledge', to enhance data from Municipalities with parameters as geographical location and accessibility, type, state of preservation, hygiene, safety of the area, public transport and parking availability; if applicable: opening period and hours, entrance fees, minimum visiting time, maximum daily visitors number. The activities will be carried out through specific projects involving upper secondary schools together with municipalities, coordinated by the National Association of Italian Municipalities - 'Technology', to develop tools ('open data' and 'open source' oriented) including: 1) an 'advisory assistant' supporting the assignment of the above parameters - with particular attention to accessibility - and data-entry; 2) an 'advisory system', for laptops and mobile devices, able to suggest places taking into account the geographical location, the parameters and user profiles - with the possibility to make use of comments left by previous visitors or simple tags "like / not like" - also providing a preview of the sites with geo-localized photos and virtual tours. In addition, a reappropriation of cultural values and an increased visibility of less known cultural assets, with potential positive impact on local tourism activities, will be achieved. The system design is aimed at collecting funds from one of the public systems of fund raising and crowd-funding; the system could be also supported by advertising on mobile devices during its operational phase.

In spite of advances in technologies for working with data, analysts still spend an inordinate amount of time diagnosing data quality issues and manipulating data into a usable form. This process of ‘data wrangling’ often constitutes the most tedious and time-consuming aspect of analysis. Though data cleaning and integration arelongstanding issues in the database community, relatively little research has explored how interactive visualization can advance the state of the art. In this article, we review the challenges and opportunities associated with addressing data quality issues. We argue that analysts might more effectively wrangle data through new interactive systems that integrate data verification, transformation, and visualization. We identify a number of outstanding research questions, including how appropriate visual encodings can facilitate apprehension of missing data, discrepant values, and uncertainty; how interactive visualizations might facilitate data transform specification; and how recorded provenance and social interaction might enable wider reuse, verification, and modification of data transformations.

The importance of usability engineering in software development is acknowledged by an increasing number of software organizations. This paper reports from a survey of the practical impact of usability engineering in software development organizations. The survey was conducted in Southern Italy, replicating one conducted in Northern Denmark three years earlier. The results show that the number of organizations conducting some form of usability activities is nearly the same, but there are important differences in the understanding of usability. The key advantages emphasized by the respondents are product quality, user satisfaction and competitiveness in both surveys. The main problems emphasized are developer mindset, resource demands and customer participation.

The evolution of communication technologies provides support to the collaboration of people that work in distributed teams. Group awareness is an important requirement for activity coordination, since understanding the activities of the others provides the context for the individual own activities and gives indications on how individual contributions are relevant to the team. This poster proposes a novel information visualization technique that aims at supporting awareness in distributed teams. Collaborative traces of team members are visualized in order to show which one is the most available and responsive.

Un'infrastruttura multimediale ed un metodo per guidare la visita ad un sito di interesse, ad esempio un sito di interesse culturale, archeologico o naturalistico. L'infrastruttura comprende dispositivi multimediali portatili aventi mezzi integrati per rilevare il segnale GPS e dotati di alloggiamenti per ricevere schede di memoria rimovibili. Nelle schede rimovibili sono memorizzati preventivamente i contenuti informativi relativi al sito; almeno uno dei dispositivi multimediali consente inoltre di memorizzare un file di registro contenente informazioni relative al percorso seguito. L'infrastruttura multimediale, di costo limitato, e il metodo di guida per la visita di un sito di interesse culturale possono essere utilizzati in modo particolarmente flessibile, vale a dire non solo come ausilio di guida a turisti o visitatori in genere, ma anche per applicazioni didattiche, ludiche e/o di intrattenimento in genere. L’infrastruttura multimediale e il metodo di guida possono essere adattati facilmente a diversi siti.