Contextual App’ification
Christian Stary
University of Linz
Department of Information Systems – Communications Engineering
Knowledge Management Competence Center
Altenbergerstraße 69, 4040 Linz, Austria
Abstract: The design and development of interactive systems has changed significantly in the last few years, due to technological development and resulting usage of applications. The development has been driven by both, smart mobile devices, and dynamically adaptable application architectures. Using apps on mobile devices as intermediaries for accessing (cloud) services as standard interaction scenario leads to an app’ification of these services with a focus on user-specific needs. However, as the number of apps a user utilizes increases, the importance of contextual design involving various apps increases. Of particular interest are task-relevant deployment and situation-sensitive experience of apps. Consider a train information app. It can be of interest in the context of both, planning a trip, and being delayed on an ongoing trip. The latter requires real-time travel assistance in contrast to the first case which is based on planned schedules. From a user perspective, any difference in context should lead to different technical system behavior. Situation- or task-sensitive support requires dynamic design variants, albeit the need for consistent user experience of particular apps across multiple settings. Being able to adapt services in a context-dependent manner results in end user computing, providing the capability to arrange apps according to an individual flow of control. Unlike the device-centric service computing the focus hereby is on a context-centric service experience caused by an app’ified design space. In such a space users should be able to design their digital services in a seamless manner. The presentation focusses on the underlying conceptual challenges of contextual app’ification and introduces a user-centered design approach based on system-of-systems thinking, and executable diagrammatic representations.
Christian Stary received his Diploma degree in Computer Science in 1984, his Ph.D. degree in Usability Engineering in 1988 and his Habilitation degree advancing Dialog Engineering in 1993 from the Vienna University of Technology, Austria. After several experiences in industry and holding international academic positions in the US and Europe he was appointed full Professor of Business Information Systems with the University of Linz in 1995. His research interests include the area of interactive distributed systems, with a strong focus on method-driven learning and explication technologies for personal capacity building and organizational development. He is principle investigator of international project deepening innovative approaches, such as subject orientation and knowledge elicitation. His research so far resulted in several publications in international journals, among them IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man & Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, Data & Knowledge Engineering, Journal of Knowledge Management. Besides organizing cross-disciplinary conferences (IEEE Networked Realities, ECCE and S-BPM ONE in cooperation with ACM, ICKM) he is active member of the IEEE, ACM, GI, and ICKM. Since 2006 he is elected member of the Leibniz Society (German Academy of Science).
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Empowering users with client-side Web augmentation tools and techniques
Marco Winckler
University Nice Sophia Antipolis
Abstract: One of the most interesting facets of Web evolution is the kind of end-users interaction with Web contents. At first, users could only browse through contents provided by Web sites. Later, users could actively contribute with content by using tools (e.g. CMS, wikis) embedded into these sites. Nowadays, many applications which, formerly, would have been designed for the desktop such as calendars, travel reservation systems, purchasing systems, library card catalogs, maps viewers or even games have made the transition to the Web, largely successfully. Many Web sites are created every day to help users to find information and/or to provide services they need. However, there are cases where rather than a new Web site, what users need is to combine information or services that are already available but scattered on the WWW. Previous work on End-User Development (EUD) demonstrated that, if appropriate tools are provided, end users might be able to create what they need (or at least define more precisely part of what they need). In this talk we introduce the concepts of Web Augmentation (WA) that is used to describe tools that can be used to improve (hence the word “augment”) existing Web pages (found for instance whilst browsing the Web) to create better fit user’s needs and activities. We describe the mechanisms supported by client-side tools and techniques for allowing users to adapt Web sites according to their individual needs. We present an overview of existing tools and we illustrate the potential of these techniques with some advanced applications such as lightweight integration of information extracted from the Web, context-sensitive navigation across diverse Web site, refactoring Web sites for accessibility and building personalized search engines. Moreover, we describe the challenges and opportunities for future research on the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Web Engineering.
Marco Winckler is full professor in Computer Sciences at the University Nice Sophia Antipolis, France and member of the SPARKS team (Scalable and Pervasive softwARe and Knowledge Systems). He investigates models, methods, techniques and tools to support the development of reliable, usable and effective interactive systems. He obtained a PhD degree in Informatics (2004) from Université of Toulouse 1 Capitole (Toulouse, France), a Master’s degree in Computer Science (1999) from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, Brazil) and a Post-doc degree from the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). His research combines topics of Engineering Interactive Systems, Human-Computer Interaction and Web Engineering. He also serves as chair for the IFIP working group 13.2 on Methodologies for User-Centered Systems Design and secretary of the IFIP TC 13 on Human-Computer Interaction. Further information on the web site: http://www.irit.fr/~Marco.Winckler