The recent
expansion of the Internet has opened the avenue to services supporting
the access to remote data repositories, the search for information
and documents, and the execution of various everyday activities,
such as home banking and e-government. Moreover, the research
about intelligent systems has enabled the human user to remotely
pilot smart machines performing difficult or dangerous tasks.
Unfortunately, the development of user interfaces supporting the
interaction with complex services and devices has not kept the
pace with the technological development, so that the potential
offered by the technology is challenged by the limited usability
of the new products and services. The gap between the user-oriented
view of the offered service and the technical level concerning
its implementation has to be filled in order to make machines
and software systems acceptable to the end-user. Moreover, the
user's trust in automated systems has to be enhanced, by taking
predictability and controllability issues into account.
The design and development of usable user interfaces has attracted
the attention of various research communities. For instance, the
Human Computer Interaction research has focused on the definition
of methodologies for the development of user interfaces that meet
the user's interaction requirements during the life cycle of products
and services. Moreover, the User Modeling and Intelligent User
Interfaces research has focused on the definition of techniques
for the dynamic adaptation of services to the individual user's
preferences. Furthermore, within the Adaptive Hypermedia field,
researchers have developed Web-based systems that tailor the content,
the interaction and the layout to the needs of users having heterogeneous
knowledge, interests, and exploiting different devices to interact
with the services (e.g., smart phones, PDAs, portable and desktop
computers).
Fundamental
challenges that must be addressed in order to make products and
services widely usable include:
· The adaptation of User Interfaces to the user's device
and to multiple communication channels, as well as to bandwidth
and other related constraints.
· The mediation between the user's interaction requirements
and the technical aspects underlying the service execution.
· The enhancement of the usability of automated decision
makers and the satisfaction of user's requirements concerning
the predictability and controllability of their behavior.
· The support for ubiquitous and multimodal interaction
with the user, taking not only technical issues, but also accessibility
and pleasure requirements into account.
· The availability of infrastructures facilitating the
development of multi-platform services.
· The provision of adaptive features and direct support
to the user during the exploration of virtual environments.
· The availability of user-centered software development
methodologies supporting the implementation of systems that can
be easily configured and tailored to the user's needs.
· The definition of guidelines and strategies for the design
of usable multimodal and multi-platform user interfaces, as well
as the availability of software environments supporting the system
development.
The
Italian Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) and Human Computer Interaction
(HCI) communities have proposed leading solutions to address the
above-mentioned challenges, which have been presented in several
International Conferences and Journals. In particular, this special
issue includes a selection of the work presented at HCITALY 2003,
the 3rd Human-Computer Interaction Symposium of SIG-CHI Italy,
organized by the Computer Science Department of the University
of Torino (Italy). The papers are focused on 5 main themes: adaptivity
and user support in 3D and animated user interfaces, user interface
design issues, end-user software development and tailoring, infrastructures
for the development of multi-platform interactive applications,
and user interfaces supporting the interaction with automated
problem solvers. Specifically:
·
Peter Brusilovsky, invited speaker at the Symposium and author
of the first article, gives a brief history of adaptive navigation
support in the pre-Web Hypermedia and discusses challenges emerging
with the evolution from Adaptive Hypermedia to the Adaptive Web.
The paper also introduces the concept of adaptive support to the
exploration of Virtual Reality environments and presents the results
of a number of projects, carried out at the University of Pittsburgh,
focused on the study of adaptive navigation support in different
contexts. The paper includes three videos demonstrating the employment
of adaptive navigation techniques in a virtual museum.
·
The adaptive navigation of 3D environments is also the focus of
the paper by Chittaro et al., who propose the introduction of
embodied characters guiding the exploration of the environments
as an effective aid to the user. In particular, the authors propose
a tool supporting the automated code generation for adding guided
tours to virtual environments and they describe the deployment
of the proposed tool in a virtual museum.
·
Abbattista et al. propose a different perspective on embodied
characters: in the paper, they overview the exploitation of animated
agents as user interface components of Web-based services. Moreover,
they describe the conversational and emotional features offered
by SAMIR, a 3D conversational agent recommending books in a Web-based
store.
· The paper by Valitutti et al. addresses open issues in
the development of expressive user interface agents having advanced
conversational capabilities. The authors discuss the importance
of Affective Computing in HCI, where the ability of displaying
emotions and of understanding the user's emotional state plays
a key role. Moreover, they present WORDNET-AFFECT, an affective
lexicon that correlates affective concepts to words and represents
a basic resource for the development of emotional user interfaces.
·
Di Nocera et al. focus on Web page design and describes experiments
aimed at suggesting criteria for the organization of objects that
optimize the user performance. They hypothesize that the location
of some web objects, such as links to specific contents, are expected
by the users at specific spatial locations, and proposes the Cognitive
GeoConcept procedure for supporting the information architect's
decisions.
·
In the paper by Costabile et al., the user participation in the
configuration and adaptation of software to individual needs is
proposed as a mean to address the usability issues emerging during
the life cycle of software. The authors present the Software Shaping
Workshops environment, which supports the development and customization
of software enabling both software engineers and domain experts
to modify products to satisfy their emerging needs and requirements.
·
Chesta et al. present a model-based approach to the development
of context-sensitive, multi-platform, nomadic applications. In
the paper, the authors describe the TERESA tool, which supports
the development activity by providing different levels of abstraction
for the specification of device-dependent user interfaces and
the enforcement of the consistency between the various interfaces.
·
The article by Cortellessa et al. addresses usability and trust
issues concerning the interaction with automated decision makers.
The authors present an intelligent user interface mediating the
interaction between the user and an automated problem solver that
schedules tasks during space missions. Moreover, they present
the results of a preliminary evaluation of the system aimed at
assessing the extent to which the proposed user interface features
enhance the usability and acceptability of the system in real
cases.
The
HCITALY 2003 Symposium has been promoted by SIG-CHI Italy (http://giove.cnuce.cnr.it/sigchi/),
the Italian association on Human-Computer Interaction. This association,
run entirely by volunteers, is active since 1995 and has the goal
of promoting and increasing knowledge and interest in the science,
technology, design, development, and application of methods, tools,
and techniques for Human Computer Interaction. SIG-CHI Italy has
scientific and educational goals, and aims at providing a mean
of communication between people interested in HCI; the [email protected]
mailing list is devoted to the exchange of information in the
field. The association also organizes meetings, conferences, discussion
groups and workshops. The main event is HCITALY, which provides
a unique opportunity for the Italian HCI community to meet and
discuss research results. In addition, daily events on specific
topics with multi-disciplinary participation are organized. For
example, the Usability and Accessibility day (http://giove.cnuce.cnr.it/usac.htm)
has been recently organized at ISTI-CNR in Pisa. Moreover, the
Natural Interaction day (http://naturalinteraction.org/workshop/)
has been organized in Firenze by the local University. Furthermore,
INTERACT (www.interact2005.org), the main IFIP HCI event, will
take place in Roma on September 12-17, 2005. The next edition
of HCITALY is planned in conjunction with this event.
