Romanian Journal of Human - Computer Interaction Vol.2, No.2, 2009 ISSN 1843-4460
	Contents Cognitive task analysis: theoretical and methodological aspects. Ana Maria Marhan   89 - 104 Practical Approaches for Interdisciplinary Interaction Design. Adriana-Mihaela Guran, Daniela-Maria Andrei   105 - 118 Using Synchronization of Interaction Techniques for Implementing a Hypervideo System Marian Dârdală, Adriana Reveiu, Titus Felix Furtună   119 - 130 Ch.A.M.P.– Modeling and Assessment System for Chat Evalution Mihai Dascălu, Ştefan Trăuşan-Matu   131 - 146 Theories and models for technology acceptance Alexandru Balog, Irina Cristescu 147 - 160   Abstracts Cognitive task analysis: theoretical and methodological aspects Ana Maria Marhan Institute of Filosophy and Psychpology ”C. Rădulescu-Motru” House of Academy, Calea 13 Septembrie 13, S5 – Bucharest amarhan@acm.org Abstract. This paper discusses some of the theoretical and methodological challenges faced by nowadays users of cognitive tasks analysis (CTA) techniques. Despite the fact that CTA is recognised as an important prerequisite for the HCI design process, offering important benefits for quality of a final product, more than often the designers will rather ignore the presentations of CTA techniques provided by sophisticated research reports and papers. A communication effort would be therefore necessary in order to identify and present relevant information for practical applications in a more user-friendly manner, easier to be comprehended, and transferred into practice, with clearer usability bench-marks and more precise directions regarding its integration in subsequent designing stages. It is suggested that a further challenge would be to test various CTA techniques in real design contexts, and asses their effectiveness and efficiency against specific tasks and situations, special design problems and particular organizational structures. Keywords: cognitive task analysis, expert, interview, knowledge elicitation. View full article   Practical Approaches for Interdisciplinary Interaction Design Adriana-Mihaela Guran1, Daniela-Maria Andrei2 1 Babeş-Bolyai University, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science Str. M. Kogălniceanu, Nr. 1, 400084, Cluj-Napoca adriana@cs.ubbcluj.ro 2 Babeş-Bolyai University, Faculty of Psychology and Education Science Str. Sindicatelor nr. 7, 400029, Cluj-Napoca daniela.onaca@psychology.ro Abstract. In this paper the evolution of software design methods is discussed with insights from the usability perspective. Usability is considered an essential factor in the success or failure of an interactive system, determining its acceptance or rejection. Although the software design methods are continuously evolving, as the user are considered essential stakeholders in the design process, there still can be notice shortages in the process of communicating between the users and the developers of the software solution. The paper presents the chronological evolution of design methods in parallel with the evolution of the usability concept, emphasizing the support provided by the design method for developing usable solutions. The article tries to correlate the software design approaches with the solutions provided by Human-Computer Interaction in order to improve the software design process. As the user centered design focuses on an interdisciplinary approach, the paper presents some practical methods of mixing the approaches from software engineering with methods provided by social sciences. Keywords: human-computer interaction, usability, design methods. View full article   Using Synchronization of Interaction Techniques for Implementing a Hypervideo System Marian Dârdală1, Adriana Reveiu2, Titus Felix Furtună3 1Academy of Economic Studies – AES Bucharest 6, Romană Square, 010374, Bucharest dardala@ase.ro 2Academy of Economic Studies – AES Bucharest 6, Romană Square, 010374, Bucharest reveiua@ase.ro 3Academy of Economic Studies – AES Bucharest 6, Romană Square, 010374, Bucharest titus@ase.ro Abstract. Multimedia applications use special techniques to browse their own content such as hypertext and hypermedia. These two concepts provide for the users semantic alternative in accessing a multimedia document. A particular way of achieving the concept of hypermedia is hypervideo. The main difficulty for realize such a system is given the fact that video data has spatial feature as well as a temporal dimension that means it lasts in time. To implement a hypervideo system has to define many modules having specialized functions and that are going to communicate each other. Thus, the article presents a data structure adapted to manage the synchronization of user interaction events, according to the timeline of the video sequence and the objects in view, which received the event. Besides the particular data structure are also presented usual operations for its maintaining as well as to explore it in the hypervideo system context. Keywords: hypertext, hypermedia, hypervideo, frame segment tree, video stream, interaction synchronization. View full article   Ch.A.M.P.– Modeling and Assessment System for Chat Evalution Mihai Dascălu1,2, Ştefan Trăuşan-Matu1,3 1 Universitatea „Politehnica“ Bucureşti, Splaiul Independenţei, Nr 313, 060042, Bucureşti E-mail: trausan@cs.pub.ro 2 CCT S.R.L. Str. Gheorghe Brătianu, Nr. 30, Bucureşti E-mail: mihai.dascalu@cct.ro 3 Institutul de Cercetări în Inteligenţă Artificială, Calea 13 Septembrie nr. 13, Bucureşti Abstract. The paper presents a system developed to assess the skills and evolution of participants in a collaborative environment. To obtain an overall approach, two scenarios have been considered: quantitative approach based on social networks and number of interchanged utterances between participants and the second, qualitative, based on the semantic content analysis of each utterance. Thus, metrics specific for social networks have been applied on the graph obtained after evaluating each utterance under contextual relevance using methods for text mining, natural language processing and latent semantic analysis.An important component of the system is the visualization module which makes possible the modeling and evolution of social networks. A specific view can be generated in order to analyze the whole chat, a discussion thread, the prospective growth/evolution of each participant, and can highlight the contribution of each participant through the statistics generated by the various metrics applied. Other modules have been developed to evaluate and annotate each chat in order to obtain the “golden sample”, to compare notes with the results obtained from automatic analysis and to learn from the corpus using WordNet and LSA. Keywords: Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, chat, evaluation, annotation, social network, web semantic, Latent Semantic Analysis. View full article   Theories and models for technology acceptance Alexandru Balog, Irina Cristescu Institutul Naţional de Cercetare-Dezvoltare în informatică – ICI Bucureşti Bd. Mareşal Averescu, Nr. 8-10, 011455, Bucureşti Abstract: The user acceptance of new technologies and systems is a topic of interest for many researchers working in various areas. In this paper we present the main theories employed in assesing the technology acceptance (theory of reasoned action, theory of planned behavior) as well as the technology acceptance models that have been developed on the basis of these theories. The focus is on the model constructs and, implicitely, on the hypotheses that have to be tested in order to validate the technology acceptance models in different contexts of use. Keywords: models for technology acceptance, TRA, TPB, TAM, TAM2, UTAUT.   View full article