Maria Francesca Costabile Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Bari, Italy

Supporting Domain-Expert Users

Pisa, 23-24 September 2002

Maria Francesca Costabile

Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Bari, Italy

[email protected]

Maria Francesca Costabile – Pisa, September 23, 2002

Outline Who we are End-users Domain-expert users Characteristics of systems for domain-expert users Software Shaping Workshops: environments for

supporting domain-expert users development


Maria Francesca Costabile*Antonio Piccinno*Dip. Informatica Università di Bari, Italy

Daniela Fogli*

Piero Mussio* Dip. Elettronica per l'Automazione Università di Brescia, Italy

Giuseppe Fresta ISTI "A. Faedo" CNR, Pisa, Italy

*Pictorial Computing Laboratory University of Rome “La Sapienza” Italy


Pictorial Computing Laboratory PCL started in 1993 at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” Director: Stefano Levialdi Main researchers: M.F. Costabile, Piero Mussio, P. Bottoni Primary theme: Analysis and use of images in HCI

Formal theory of Visual Languages to model Visual Interaction

IEEE Symposia on Visual Languages, now Symposia on Human-Centric Computing

Journal on Visual Languages and Computer Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) Conferences, AVI’04 in Bari


End-users A user of an application program. Typically, the term means that

the person is not a computer programmer. A person who uses a computer as part of their daily life or daily work, but is not interested in computers per se.

Allen Cypher, “Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration“

End-User Computing is “..the adoption and use of information technology by people outside the information system department, to develop software applications in support of organizational tasks”

Brancheau and Brown, “The Management of End-User Computing: Status and Directions”, ACM Computing Surveys, 25 (4), 1993

End-users are experts in a specific domain, who use computer systems to develop software applications


Domain-expert users Domain-expert users: experts in a specific domain, not necessarily

experts in computer science, who use computer environments to perform their daily tasks

They are responsible for the tasks accomplished through the system

They must understand the consequences of the system activity and must be in control of the interactive computation

Domain examples: Medicine Mechanical Engineer Earth Science


The communicational gap Users and designers adopt different reasoning

strategies: heuristic vs. algorithmic examples, analogies vs. deductive abstract tools concreteness vs. abstraction

Users are forced to express their problems in “computerese”

Interactive systems are difficult to learn and use


Bridging the gap

Recognizing users as experts!!! in their field, not in CS

Recognizing that experts develop languages and notations to reason on problems and communicate solutions

Designing systems which make abstract CS concepts concrete to users and allow users to follow their learning and reasoning strategies


The designer teamSoftware Experts

Domain Experts HCI Experts


User diversity within a domain It depends not only on user skill, culture, knowledge,

but also on specific abilities (physical/cognitve), tasks and context

“using the system changes the users, and as they change they will use the system in new ways”

Nielsen, Usability Engineering

New uses of the system make the environment evolve and force to adapt the system to the evolved user and environment


Loop 2

Loop 1

TechnologyOrganizational context

User view of the task

System

Adapted from [Bourguin & al. 2001]

Co-evolution


User tailoring User diversity user tailoring

Decoupling between pictorial and computational representations of concepts

PCL theory of visual sentences and model of visual interaction


PCL interaction model

screen

materialization materialization

interpretation interpretation


characteristic structures a characteristic structure (cs) is a set of pixels relevant

to the interaction process

Edit


attributed symbols a set of css can be identified on an image i on the screen

the computer interprets every gesture with respect to the image i on the screen using a description d of it

d is a set of attributed symbols, each describing the computational meaning of a cs in i

Bullet (b11, 279, 224, 18, blue, comp-action=‘link to a page’) tuple of properties


visual sentence the relations between characteristic structures and

attributed symbols are specified by 2 functions:

int: CSi d (interpretation function)where CSi is the set of css in image i

mat: d CSi (materialization function)

a visual sentence (vs) is a triple < i, d, < int, mat > >

a visual language VL is a set of vss


mat & int A concept is materialised on the screen through a mat

function that associates the attributed symbol describing the concept to a specific cs

The same concept can be materialised in another cs through a different mat function

int & mat allow user tailoring


Example in earth science domain An Environmental Agency

Experts perform: photo interpretation of satellite images to obtain medium and

long term environmental forecast organize the forecast results into reports and thematic maps for

different communities of client experts (planner, decision maker, ...)

Two categories of experts arise:photo-interpreters and clerks, sharing similar notations but having different tasks to achieve


int & mat for the photo-interpreter

dint1 mat1


int & mat for the clerk

dint2 mat2


How to support domain-expert users

Design environments in which domain-expert users interact in their visual notations and with tools familiar to them


Software Shaping Workshops Software environments as workshops in which users

find and use virtual tools resembling their notations and habits and necessary to accomplish their activities

Analogy to real workshops, such as blacksmith or joiner workshops

More user categories SSW hierarchy


System workshop

B-GlacManager

generation

Application workshop

B-monitore

generation

Application workshop

B-glacier

System workshop

B-SwEngineer

System workshop

B-AirManager

System workshop

B-VegManager

generationgeneration

… …

generation

…

generation

…

A 3-level Visual Workshop Hierarchy


The photo-interpreter environment

The photo-interpreter obtains the spectral signature of the ‘ablation area’ using tools and notations familiar to her


The clerk environment

The clerk obtains the glaciological parameters using the button ‘ablation area’ using tools and notations familiar to him


Conclusion Software Shaping Workshops are computer environments aimed

at supporting the activities of domain-expert users Novel features of our approach are:

1) it is collaborative in that end-users, as domain experts, assume a responsibility in the design;

2) the SSWs are able to associate different pictorial representations to a same computational representation, and vice versa, thus permitting end-user tailoring;

3) end-users can perform their tasks interacting with the SSWs through interaction visual languages, which resemble their traditional notations and tools;

4) the system is evolutive and allows the domain-expert user to generate another SSW with new functionalities.

We are experimenting this apprach in various domains, using the software tool BANCO

Maria Francesca Costabile Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Bari, Italy

Documents

Transcript of Maria Francesca Costabile Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Bari, Italy