Marco Winckler

Adrian Reuter, Karima Boudaoud, Marco Winckler et al.

Several end-to-end encryption technologies for emails such as PGP and S/MIME exist since decades. However, end-to-end encryption is barely applied. To understand why users hesitate to secure their email communication and which usability issues they face with PGP, S/MIME as well as with pEp (Pretty Easy Privacy), a fairly new technology, we conducted an online survey and user testing. We found that more than 60% of e-mail users are unaware of the existence of such encryption technologies and never tried to use one. We observed that above all, users are overwhelmed with the management of public keys and struggle with the setup of encryption technology in their mail software. Even though users struggle to put email encryption into practice, we experienced roughly the same number of users being aware of the importance of email encryption. Particularly, we found that users are very concerned about identity theft, as 78% want to make sure that no other person is able to write email in their name.

Gabriela Bosetti, Sergio Firmenich, Silvia Gordillo et al.

The trend towards mobile devices usage has put more than ever the Web as a ubiquitous platform where users perform all kind of tasks. In some cases, users access the Web with 'native' mobile applications developed for well-known sites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. These native applications might offer further (e.g. location-based) functionalities to their users in comparison with their corresponding Web sites, because they were developed with mobile features in mind. However, most Web applications have not this native mobile counterpart and users access them using browsers in the mobile device. Users might eventually want to add mobile features on these Web sites even though those features were not supported originally. In this paper we present a novel approach to allow end users to augment their preferred Web sites with mobile features. This end-user approach is supported by a framework for mobile Web augmentation that we describe in the paper. We also present a set of supporting tools and a validation experiment with end users.

Thiago Rocha, Jean-Luc Hak, Marco Winckler et al.

Prototyping is one of the core activities of User-Centered Design (UCD) processes and an integral component of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. For many years, prototyping was synonym of paper-based mockups and only more recently we can say that dedicated tools for supporting prototyping activities really reach the market. In this paper, we propose to analyze the evolution of prototyping tools for supporting the development process of interactive systems. For that, this paper presents a review of the literature. We analyze the tools proposed by academic community as a proof of concepts and/or support to research activities. Moreover, we also analyze prototyping tools that are available in the market. We report our observation in terms of features that appear over time and constitute milestones for understating the evolution of concerns related to the development and use of prototyping tools. This survey covers publications published since 1988 in some of the main HCI conferences and 118 commercial tools available on the web. The results enable a brief comparison of characteristics present in both academic and commercial tools, how they have evolved, and what are the gaps that can provide insights for future research and development.

Sergio Firmenich, Gabriela Bosetti, Gustavo Rossi et al.

Nowadays, the development of Web applications supporting distributed user interfaces (DUI) is straightforward. However, it is still hard to find Web sites supporting this kind of user interaction. Although studies on this field have demonstrated that DUI would improve the user experience, users are not massively empowered to manage these kinds of interactions. In this setting, we propose to move the responsibility of distributing both the UI and user interaction, from the application (a Web application) to the client (the Web browser), giving also rise to inter-application interaction distribution. This paper presents a platform for client-side DUI, built on the foundations of Web augmentation and End User Development. The idea is to empower end users to apply an augmentation layer over existing Web applications, considering both frequent use and opportunistic DUI requirements. In this work, we present the architecture and a prototype tool supporting this approach and illustrate the incorporation of some DUI features through case studies.

Thaise Costa, Liliane Machado, Ana Maria Gondim Valença et al.

Applications for learning and training have been developed and highlighted as important tools in health education. Despite the several approaches and initiatives, these tools have not been used in an integrated way. The specific skills approached by each application, the absence of a consensus about how to integrate them in the curricula, and the necessity of evaluation tools that standardize their utilization are the main difficulties. Considering these issues, Portal of Games and Environments Management for Designing Activities in Health (Pegadas) was designed and developed as a web portal that offers the services of organizing and sequencing serious games and virtual environments and evaluating the performance of the user in these activities. This article presents the structure of Pegadas, including the proposal of an evaluation model based on learning objectives. The results indicate its potential to collaborate with human resources training from the proposal of the sequencing, allowing a linked composition of activities and providing the reinforcement or complement of tasks and contents in a progressive scale with planned educational objective-based evaluation. These results can contribute to expand the discussions about ways to integrate the use of these applications in health curricula.

Gabriela Bosetti, Sergio Firmenich, Alejandro Fernandez et al.

The World Wide Web is a vast and continuously changing source of information where searching is a frequent, and sometimes critical, user task. Searching is not always the user's primary goal but an ancillary task that is performed to find complementary information allowing to complete another task. In this paper, we explore primary and/or ancillary search tasks and propose an approach for simplifying the user interaction during search tasks. Rather than fo-cusing on dedicated search engines, our approach allows the user to abstract search engines already provided by Web applications into pervasive search services that will be available for performing searches from any other Web site. We also propose to allow users to manage the way in which searching results are displayed and the interaction with them. In order to illustrate the feasibility of this approach, we have built a support tool based on a plug-in architecture that allows users to integrate new search services (created by themselves by means of visual tools) and execute them in the context of both kinds of searches. A case study illustrates the use of these tools. We also present the results of two evaluations that demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and the benefits in its use.

Thiago Rocha, Jean-Luc Hak, Marco Winckler

Nowadays many software development frameworks implement Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) as a mean of automating the test of interactive systems under construction. Automated testing helps to simulate user's action on the User Interface and therefore check if the system behaves properly and in accordance to Scenarios that describe functional requirements. However, most of tools supporting BDD requires that tests should be written using low-level events and components that only exist when the system is already implemented. As a consequence of such low-level of abstraction, BDD tests can hardly be reused with diverse artifacts and with versions of the system. To address this problem, this paper proposes to raise the abstraction level by the means of a behavior-based ontology that is aimed at supporting test automation. The paper presents an ontology and an on-tology-based approach for automating the test of functional requirements of interactive systems. With the help of a case study for the flight tickets e-commerce domain, we demonstrate how tests written using our ontology can be used to assess functional requirements using different artifacts, from low-fidelity to full-fledged UI Prototypes.