Human-Computer Interaction

Awareness is of paramount importance to effective collaboration. Groupware systems have traditionally implemented awareness in the form of visual cues. With the advent of alternatives user interface strategies, such as haptic feedback, new ways of implementing awareness are available. The lack of documented experience on the design of effective, haptic awareness mechanisms makes it important to count on flexible prototyping and evaluation tools that can support and shorten an exploratory design process. We argue that design of awareness features should consider modalities from the start. To support the discussion, we present a modeling language and supporting tools to express haptic awareness features, and we show how the language can be used in the context of model driven development of groupware.

Industry 4.0 brought a series of changes in the production model worldwide by inserting information technologies as a central element of its proposed revolution. This ecosystem of trends and technologies encompasses concepts such as greater flexibility and optimization of production resources, through the interaction of human factors and technology. However, the advances and benefits achieved since the establishment of this model are unevenly arranged among countries, where those considered peripheral from the point of view of capitalist development have little access to technologies and transformations, being at a competitive disadvantage compared to more developed countries. This article presents an analyze the stage of development of industry 4.0 in Brazil based on the literature and records of technologies and processes implementation responsible for digital transformation in Brazilian companies. The results show that, in addition to the process of adopting practices towards the evolution of Industry 4.0 being embryonic in the Brazilian context, there is little research that addresses the digital maturity of Brazilian companies.

This article shows the results of a study carried out in Argentina and Mexico, which allows evaluating the level of technological development of the industry, identifying the products of Industry 4.0 that have been implemented by functional area and, from there, selecting the tasks that will characterize the specific users of each area according to the function they develop and the technologies that they must perform.

A survey in a set of companies in each country was conducted. The study is exploratory, on a non-probabilistic sample, applying a technological evaluation index introduced in this article, and the results allow to analyze the products of Industry 4.0 in the functional areas of the companies.

Finally, an initial identification of tasks by function is proposed that leads to a characterization of users in the different functional areas of a company.

In-vehicle information systems (IVIS) represent a growing industry. IVIS were originally built and deployed by car manufacturers, which ensured that they complied with the safety regulations of the car industry. Nowadays, IVIS enter the vehicle in the driver’s and passenger’s phones. These “nomadic IVIS”, which sometimes interact with the car’s entertainment system, can escape important safety checks. Any software developer, without training in vehicle safety, can build and distribute IVIS. This reality calls for tools and methods that help software developers conceive safe applications. This article proposes an affordable and reliable testing suite that provides support to developers of nomadic IVIS. The suite takes the form of a simulation and data collection environment, oriented to the rapid prototyping of IVIS. It considers security requirements while maintaining a low technological and economic threshold, to provide easy access to developers compared to expensive physical environments with real vehicles.

Usability is the degree of ease of a product to be used, it is the quality of the experience that a user has when interacting with a software product, determining the efficiency of the interface and the effectiveness of the tasks. Currently, there is a lack of knowledge, lack of what and how to apply usability in specific contexts, therefore, considering its importance, this paper shows the process of building a usability guide for the design of interactive mobile applications in the context of learning mathematics for children aged 6 and 7 years. For its construction was used the methodology of multi-cycle action research with bifurcation, with which the conceptualization, construction, and validation of the usability guide was performed. It was obtained that the guidelines and the guide to support the use of these guidelines are complete, useful, and easy to use.

Collaborative work focuses on the interaction between a group of participants and the corresponding search to achieve a better-shared understanding of a problem, while they perform common tasks cooperating towards the achievement of the same objective. In this search for shared understanding, the differences in the experiences, knowledge, and other characteristics of the participants, make it complex to consider all opinions, points of view and also, that everyone understands and agrees with the topic of the activity and with the central idea of what is going to be solved. While trying to tackle these problematics, we defined THUNDERS, a process for building shared understanding in problem-solving activities. This work presents THUNDERS process as well as the quality validation of its process model SPEM 2.0, and an experiment with which its viability and usefulness was validated. The THUNDERS process enables to design, execute, and verify collaborative activities by using a set of phases, activities, tasks, work products, roles, and workflows in a planned way. The multi-cycle action-research methodology with bifurcation was used in the construction of the process. According to the results of the validations, it can be said that THUNDERS is feasible and useful for the building of shared understanding. However, some aspects to be improved were identified, such as the cognitive overload generated by its use and some elements of its formalization in SPEM; likewise, the need to incorporate mechanisms to monitor and assist the permanence of understanding throughout the execution of the activity was identified.

Being able to have a system capable of identifying drivers offers many applications, among the most relevant being the ability to generate user personalized interfaces in automotive environments that can improve the user experience as well as their comfort. Currently proposed solutions include biometric data, global processing systems, driver images and data extracted from vehicle sensors. In these solutions, degree of invasiveness, noise in signals and large number of variables used are problem for their practical application. This document proposes a driver identification scheme to address these challenges. The scheme uses data extracted from steering wheel and the brake and acceleration pedals to learn driving patterns of each subject through some machine learning techniques in a simulated environment. Data extraction, analysis, processing, and results show that drivers could be identified with significant accuracy. To evaluate the depth classification models, validation metrics were applied where random forest algorithm obtained an accuracy of 83%. Thus, concluding that generated dataset can provide relevant information for driver identification.

This paper presents a process implemented for the analysis of the frontend design of an infotainment system through the evaluation of a set of heuristics in a parked vehicle. The guidelines used to evaluate the system cover design, interaction and connectivity dimensions, which are studied through the execution of a usability test whose objective is to identify the pain points that arise from the interaction of the characterized users (22 to 24 years and no experience in infotainment systems) with the vehicle. A redesign proposal is also made as a result of the vulnerabilities that were found through the observation technique in the usability test. Obtained results include a summary of the feedback from the usability test and the redesign proposal whose objective is to promote a better user experience and satisfy the passenger needs.

Model-driven development (MDD) and user interface development (UID) are two interesting research areas in software engineering. While MDD is a paradigm which fosters the models as the main artifact in the software development life cycle, UID deals with methods and techniques for developing high-quality, highly productive user interfaces in terms of usability and reusability. Although research into the use of MDD for UID might well be of interest to the international research community, no such work has yet been published. The aim of this paper is to assess the state of the art in MDD for UID. It mainly focuses on identifying the features of MDD approaches that support UID; how these proposals impact the quality of the software; and what methodological aspects are considered by these proposals. We carried out a systematic mapping study. As a result, 110 papers were analyzed in terms of the criteria obtained from the research questions. This study allows our research questions to be answered. We would like to highlight firstly the predominance of research in purely academic scenarios; secondly, the lack of empirical proof to demonstrate the impact of the approaches; thirdly, the non-existence of methodologies to guide the MDUID process; fourthly, the wide number of tools adopted to support MDUID; and fifthly, the preference for using the task model in the approaches analyzed. This study enables us to determine the state of the art in the topic as well as to identify various problems worthy of future research.

The Open Educational Resources (OER) repositories store a large quantity and variety of data from multiple sources, and that present relevant and useful information for the student training process, improving student performance thanks to more up-to-date and didactic educational content, this generates the need for a more specialized Learning Objects (LO) search system. In this research work, a multi-label search platform is proposed based on the learning purpose that unifies the information from different OER in a single platform, using an information extraction process based on Web Scraping techniques and generating a selection of one of them. Or multiple tags, based on the SOLO taxonomy, using an MLP-based multi-tag classifier. As a result, we obtained the improvement of the most specialized search and content according to what teachers really need, up to 85% accuracy of the resources they needed and approval of the use of the platform up to 78.57%.

Over the years, a significant amount of research has been done to discover links and/or effects of human personality in the field of software engineering (SI). It has been shown that personality has a positive influence on the different tasks and/or processes in this field. Related studies helped to identify a suitable personality type for each profile in the SI. However, contradictions have also been found in the results that question their validity, therefore, generalizing and applying these results may be misleading. This is because one of the key and complex factors is evaluating the personality of engineers or software developers from a psychological point of view. Through a systematic mapping study, an attempt was made to characterize the most widely used, reliable and valid psychological instruments/models. However, most of the articles considered for this study were based solely on the data available in the literature; making purely conceptual comparisons. A more exhaustive comparative analysis between said instruments/models was expected. Despite this, it was possible to identify that MBTI is the most popular to examine the personality of software developers. However, the Big Five and its psychometric instruments such as BFI and NEO-FFI have gained more prominence in SI research in recent years. It is necessary to highlight and call on the scientific community to carry out this type of research in a more rigorous way and that it be supported and guided by specialized areas in human behavior, which allows for minimizing contradictions for future research.

Technologies that support co-located collaboration must not only provide a shared workspace, but also support collaboration. We are interested in supporting co-located collaboration through computer systems that encourage group interaction, that is, systems that observe and analyze the interaction of collaborators, identify when there is a problem in the collaboration and execute social interventions to improve collaboration while they try to complete their activity. In order to validate whether the effectiveness of the group would improve when they receive social interventions on their group performance, an experimental study was executed. The study consisted of observing co-located student groups collaborating to design a web interface prototype, comparing teams that received social interventions from external human facilitator and those that did not. With this experimental study, results were obtained that help to characterize groups of students working in a co-located environment, and that could be considered in a system that encourages collaboration.

The Human-Computer Interaction can be modelled as Signals and Noises process. In this sense game-player interaction could be improved when this point of view is applied. Signals-Noises-Aiders (SNA) is presented as method with heuristics that help to reducing noises using power-ups as aiders. The results in Flappy Bird Mechanic showed the method’s pertinence and its effectiveness in power-ups design. This work presents how to compute the rewards (e.g. power-ups) influences, contributing thus to HCI in games.

Well-being is a complex phenomenon that is deeply depends on the individuals themselves and includes subjective perception of the past, present and future experiences. Connecting with work adds a concrete dimension to that well-being that makes it possible to consider designing for well-being and assessing it. One key element related to well-being is engagement at work and gameful design is a mean to increase engagement. This position paper builds on the evolution of the field of HCI over the years to identify means of addressing well-being through engagement. We describe the concepts related to Usability and how they evolved towards User Experience to encompass more complex (related to self) elements. We show how previous work in the field has connected these two major properties (using tasks descriptions) and how it might be possible to extend further embracing human needs and motivation theory. A concrete example is given in the context of interaction with a digital clock. Even though this example is simple, it conveys the concerns and highlights possible directions towards solutions.

The massification of technologies, the implementation of 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT), allow implementing systems that contain virtual or augmented reality or implementation of both. In this sense, the covid 19 pandemic in the last years, has also affected people’s behavior and leaned to shop without leaving their homes. VR, RA, and/or MR techniques are currently widely used for medicine, education, and entertainment, among others. In this study, we combine both elements to analyze the literature on e-commerce and the use of VR, AR, and/or RM. Searching and analyzing recent scientific articles were defined, and virtual reality is the most used, followed by the mixture of RV and RA, the above to improve the shopping experience, providing the customer with a more authentic and immersive environment. In future works, we will expect to expand this study, including how to evaluate the shopping experience and relate it to the customer experience.