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.

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.

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.

In this paper we present the “Learning4All” (L4ALL) project, which has the aim of developing knowledge about how technology and pedagogy influence the quality of educational experiences. Our approach is empirical rather than theoretical: instead of scavenging literature, we collect credible evidence from Italian teachers on the job who create innovation in schools using technology. The concrete result of the project will be an online repository of hundreds of experiences, carried out in classes of all levels of schooling, where technology was skillfully combined with pedagogical solutions to generate substantial educational benefits. A specific focus is on inclusion, i.e. detecting how diverse needs (for underperforming or over performing pupils) were considered. This paper describes the project approach,the investigation tools developed so far and how they were used.

This paper illustrates our approach to enhance the visit experience of archeological parks. It exploits composition technologies, End-User Development and participa-tory design approaches, in order to allow different stakeholders to create, use and share Personal Information Spaces. Heterogeneous content can be combined and manipulated to satisfy different information needs, thus enabling personalized vis-its to Cultural Heritage sites.

ICT technologies have a great potential not only for preserving and increasing awareness about cultural heritage, but also for allowing people to better experience this huge legacy. Various application tools have already been developed which provide different types of multimedia resources, such as 3D representations of objects and places, videos, graphics, sounds, in order to augment the physical context by providing virtual, location-specific information, so that people can experience some aspects of ancient life which would otherwise be very difficult to figure out. The effort spent to create multimedia resources is considerable; therefore, it is worth reusing them to produce applications suited to other types of visitors. In this paper, we present our on-going work to provide tailored applications that support different types of visitors. Such applications are developed according to a model that describes how multimedia resources can be combined, also depending on the type of users and devices. Examples of these solutions are briefly illustrated

The huge amount of heterogeneous content available nowadays on the Web pushes towards approaches and tools to allow people, even non-technical ones, to retrieve, combine and manipulate such content, in order to satisfy their knowledge needs. In this paper we illustrate how composition technologies enable teacher and students to create, use and share interactive workspaces that can enhance their learning experience about history and cultural heritage

Pervasive games have been proposed as a suitable way to support learning, especially in places rich in information, as for example museums and cultural heritage sites. This paper reports on the work performed to identify guidelines that help designers in developing games able to provide an effective learning experience in such contexts. Such guidelines complement other proposals available in the literature. The presented contribution is a first step of a wider work aimed at deepening our understanding of pervasive educational games, with a special emphasis on games in the cultural heritage domain, in order to inform the designers of such challenging applications.

Distance education has experienced profound changes due to the introduction of new technologies, especially mobile devices of different types. It is necessary to define new learning techniques which are able to capture students' attention and to engage them in their learning activities, reducing problems like distraction generated by the use of the device itself and/or by the surrounding environment. Game-based learning is a valuable possibility. The excursion-game has been recently proposed to support pupils learning history during visits to historical sites; its goal is to make the visit and the overall experience of cultural heritage more engaging. This paper describes the approach followed in the design of the system implementing the excursion-game; it takes into account an end-user development perspective in order to allow domain experts, i.e., experts in history and cultural heritage, contributing to design excursion-games for a wide set of historical sites.

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.

Explore! is designed to be used in a wider set of historical sites. The game content historical information, 3-D reconstructions and sounds is provided by XML files and can be authored in numerous ways and adapted to different sites. A great advantage of Explore!, which makes it very attractive for use in archaeological parks across Italy with very limited funds, is that the game infrastructure requires almost no investment by the park. The system can also show high-resolution 3-D models of other areas that might not be accessible in the park. Explore! has been field tested with 124 middle-school students, who expressed excitement about the opportunity to use technology during their visit and commented on how nice it was to use a cell phone for the game and see the 3-D reconstructions. They provide added value in terms of stimulating learners' engagement, increasing their motivation, and arousing their curiosity, while permitting immersion in the learning environment. The system runs on commercial cell phones, and the software is all contained in the phone's memory card.

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 paper 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

Recent advances in computing devices push researchers to envision new interaction modalities that go beyond traditional mouse and keyboard input. Typical examples are large displays for which researchers hope to create more “natural” means of interaction by using human gestures and body movements as input. In this article, we reflect about this goal of designing gestures that people can easily understand and use and how designers of gestural interaction can capitalize on the experience of 30 years of research on visual languages to achieve it. Concretely, we argue that gestures can be regarded as “visual expressions to convey meaning” and thus are a visual language. Based on what we have learned from visual language research in the past, we then explain why the design of a generic gesture set or language that spans many applications and devices is likely to fail. We also discuss why we recommend using gestural manipulations that enable users to directly manipulate on-screen objects instead of issuing commands with symbolic gestures whose meaning varies among different users, contexts, and cultures.

This paper describes how to involve end users without expertise in programming in a session where they will be asked to accomplish some tasks according to a new paradigm for actionable mashups. The goal will be to understand what the advantages of this new paradigm are with respect to traditional methods for mashup composition and information exploration.

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.

This paper discusses motivations and requirements leading to elastic environments where relevant information and the functions that can be performed on it can be shaped by end users at runtime. As a solution for creating elastic environments, a framework is presented which exploits methods for the mashup of heterogeneous resources and elastic features that permit the easy transition of information between different task contexts according to the recently proposed notion of transformative user experience

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

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 advent on the market of multi-touch devices has prompted studies that investigate the use of such devices in learning domain, demonstrating that games are an effective way of exploiting these new technologies that allow pupils to achieve informal learning and foster collaboration during their educational activities. We defined an educational format that combines traditional learning performed at school with educational multimedia games implemented on a multi-touch screen, set up vertically. A field study showed the effectiveness of this educational format, supporting the use of applications on the multi-touch display to help pupils consolidating the acquired knowledge. This paper reports a complementary study that analyses pupils’ reactions to the use of a traditional desktop as compared with the use of the multi-touch screen. Results provided further evidence that pupils enjoy interacting with the multi-touch screen, because it allows them to collaborate and to use their hands, directly moving objects about on the screen.

Nel presente articolo presentiamo il progetto “Learning4All” (L4ALL), che ha l’obiettivo di sviluppare le conoscenze riguardo a come tecnologia e pedagogia influenzino la qualità delle esperienze didattiche. Il nostro approccio è empirico piuttosto che teorico: invece di una ricerca nella letteratura, noi raccogliamo prove empiriche da insegnanti italiani che creano innovazione utilizzando la tecnologia nella scuola. Il risultato concreto del progetto sarà un repository online di centinaia di esperienze, condotte in classi di ogni livello scolastico, nelle quali la tecnologia è stata abilmente combinata con soluzioni pedagogiche allo scopo di generare sostanziali benefici didattici. Specifica enfasi del progetto è sul tema dell’inclusione, vale a dire individuare come le diverse esigenze (di alunni con performance al di sopra o al di sotto della media) sono considerate. Questo articolo descrive l’approccio utilizzato, gli strumenti di indagine sviluppati fino a questo momento, come sono stati usati, e che cosa i dati raccolti finora sembrano indicare.

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

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.