Bücher von Philippe Palanque

The wait for the year 2000 was marked by the fear of possible bugs that might have arisen at its beginning. One additional fear we had during this wait was whether - ganising this event would have generated a boon or another bug. The reasons for this fear originated in the awareness that the design of interactive systems is a fast moving area. The type of research work presented at this unique event has received limited support from funding agencies and industries making it more difficult to keep up with the rapid technological changes occurring in interaction technology. However, despite our fear, the workshop was successful because of the high-quality level of participation and discussion. Before discussing such results, let us step back and look at the evolution of DSV-IS (Design, Specification and Verification of Interactive Systems), an international wo- shop that has been organised every year since 1994. The first books that addressed this issue in a complete and thorough manner were the collection of contributions edited by Harrison and Thimbleby and the book written by Alan Dix, which focused on abstractions useful to highlight important concepts in the design of interactive systems. Since then, this area has attracted the interest of a wider number of research groups, and some workshops on related topics started to be organised. DSV-IS had its origins in this spreading and growing interest. The first workshop was held in a monastery located in the hills above Bocca di Magra (Italy).

Formal methods have already been shown to improve the development process and quality assurance in system design and implementation. This volume examines whether these benefits also apply to the field of human-computer interface design and implementation, and whether formal methods can offer useful support in usability evaluation and obtaining more reliable implementations of user requirements. Its main aim is to compare the different approaches and examine which particular type of implementation and problem each one is best suited to. To enable the reader to compare and contrast the approaches as easily as possible, each one is applied to the same case study: the specification of an ideal Netscape-like web browser and html page server. The resulting volume will provide invaluable reading for final year undergraduate and postgraduate courses on user interfaces, user interface design, and applications of formal methods.

This book developed from an IFIP workshop which brought together methods and architecture researchers in Human Computer Interaction and Software Engineering. To an extent this introduction is a little unfair to the authors, as we have distilled the results of the workshop to give the reader a perspective of the problems within integrated approaches to usability engineering. The papers could not hope to address all ofthe issues; however, we hope that a framework will help the reader gainfurther insights into current research andfuture practice. The initial motivation was to bring together researchers and practitioners to exchange their experiences on Graphical User Interface (Gill) design problems. The two groups represented methodological and architecture/tools interests, so the workshop focused on intersection of how methods can support user interface development and vice versa, how tools, architectures and reusable components can empower the design process. There is, we believe, a constructive tension between these two communities. Methodologists tend to approach the design problem with task/domain/organisational analysis while the tool builders suggest design empowerment/envisioning as a means ofimproving the way users work rather than relying on analysis ofcurrent systems. This debate revolves around the questions of whether users' current work is optimal, or whether designers have the insight to empower users by creating effective solutions to their problems. Tool builders typically want to build something, then get the users to try it, while the methodologists want to specify something, validate it and then build it.