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Manuel A. Perez-Quinones

Publications and source records attributed to Manuel A. Perez-Quinones.

15 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2009

Exploring Peer Review in the Computer Science Classroom

In computer science, students could benefit from more opportunities to learn important, high-level concepts and to improve their learning skills. Peer review is one method to encourage this by providing students with the opportunity to evaluate other people's work and to receive feedback on their own projects. This allows for rich learning experience but it is not immediately obvious how to create a programming project review that will improve the students' conceptual understanding, require higher level thinking, and be engaging. The current literature does not typically address differences between review implementations or provide reasons for design decisions. This work explored how two different types of reviews affected the students' learning of concepts, high-level thinking, and engagement. There were indications that the type of review affected how well students addressed the concept they were reviewing and the comments' length. This shows that the review's type may affect student engagement and conceptual learning. There were also differences in how they reviewed the concepts of Abstraction, Decomposition, and Encapsulation, suggesting that the concepts are being learned in different ways. Both of these results have an impact on the use of peer review computer science but need further investigation.

cs.CY↗
arXiv2006

Effect of Interface Style in Peer Review Comments for UML Designs

This paper presents our evaluation of using a Tablet-PC to provide peer-review comments in the first year Computer Science course. Our exploration consisted of an evaluation of how students write comments on other students' assignments using three different methods: pen and paper, a Tablet-PC, and a desktop computer. Our ultimate goal is to explore the effect that interface style (Tablet vs. Desktop) has on the quality and quantity of the comments provided.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2006

minimUML: A Minimalist Approach to UML Diagraming for Early Computer Science Education

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is commonly used in introductory Computer Science to teach basic object-oriented design. However, there appears to be a lack of suitable software to support this task. Many of the available programs that support UML focus on developing code and not on enhancing learning. Those that were designed for educational use sometimes have poor interfaces or are missing common and important features, such as multiple selection and undo/redo. There is a need for software that is tailored to an instructional environment and has all the useful and needed functionality for that specific task. This is the purpose of minimUML. minimUML provides a minimum amount of UML, just what is commonly used in beginning programming classes, while providing a simple, usable interface. In particular, minimUML was designed to support abstract design while supplying features for exploratory learning and error avoidance. In addition, it allows for the annotation of diagrams, through text or freeform drawings, so students can receive feedback on their work. minimUML was developed with the goal of supporting ease of use, supporting novice students, and a requirement of no prior-training for its use.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2004

Culture and International Usability Testing: The Effects of Culture in Structured Interviews

The global audience for software products includes members of different countries, religions, and cultures: people who speak different languages, have different life styles, and have different perceptions and expectations of any given product. A major impediment in interface development is that there is inadequate empirical evidence for the effects of culture in the usability engineering methods used for developing user interfaces. This paper presents a controlled study investigating the effects of culture on the effectiveness of structured interviews in usability testing. The experiment consisted of usability testing of a website with two independent groups of Indian participants by two interviewers; one belonging to the Indian culture and the other to the Anglo-American culture. Participants found more usability problems and made more suggestions to an interviewer who was a member of the same (Indian) culture than to the foreign (Anglo-American) interviewer. The results of the study empirically establish that culture significantly affects the efficacy of structured interviews during international user testing. The implications of this work for usability engineering are discussed.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2004

What we should teach, but don't: Proposal for a cross pollinated HCI-SE curriculum

Software engineering (SE) and usability engineering (UE), as disciplines, have reached substantial levels of maturity. Each of these two disciplines is now well represented with respect to most computer science (CS) curricula. But, the two disciplines are practiced almost independently - missing oppurtunities to collaborate, coordinate and communicate about the overall design - and thereby contributing to system failures. Today, a confluence of several ingredients contribute to these failures: the increasing importance of the user interface (UI) component in the overall system, the independent maturation of the human computer interaction area, and the lack of a cohesive process model to integrate the UI experts' UE development efforts with that of SE. This in turn, we believe, is a result of a void in computing curricula: a lack of education and training regarding the importance of communication, collaboration and coordination between the SE and UE processes. In this paper we describe the current approach to teaching SE and UE and its shortcomings. We identify and analyze the barriers and issues involved in developing systems having substantial interactive components. We then propose four major themes of learning for a comprehensive computing curriculum integrating SE, UE, and system architectures in a project environment.

cs.OH↗
arXiv2004

Mobile Re-Finding of Web Information Using a Voice Interface

Mobile access to information is a considerable problem for many users, especially to information found on the Web. In this paper, we explore how a voice-controlled service, accessible by telephone, could support mobile users' needs for refinding specific information previously found on the Web. We outline challenges in creating such a service and describe architectural and user interfaces issues discovered in an exploratory prototype we built called WebContext. We also present the results of a study, motivated by our experience with WebContext, to explore what people remember about information that they are trying to refind and how they express information refinding requests in a collaborative conversation. As part of the study, we examine how end-usercreated Web page annotations can be used to help support mobile information re-finding. We observed the use of URLs, page titles, and descriptions of page contents to help identify waypoints in the search process. Furthermore, we observed that the annotations were utilized extensively, indicating that explicitly added context by the user can play an important role in re-finding.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2003

Taking the Initiative with Extempore: Exploring Out-of-Turn Interactions with Websites

We present the first study to explore the use of out-of-turn interaction in websites. Out-of-turn interaction is a technique which empowers the user to supply unsolicited information while browsing. This approach helps flexibly bridge any mental mismatch between the user and the website, in a manner fundamentally different from faceted browsing and site-specific search tools. We built a user interface (Extempore) which accepts out-of-turn input via voice or text; and employed it in a US congressional website, to determine if users utilize out-of-turn interaction for information-finding tasks, and their rationale for doing so. The results indicate that users are adept at discerning when out-of-turn interaction is necessary in a particular task, and actively interleaved it with browsing. However, users found cascading information across information-finding subtasks challenging. Therefore, this work not only improves our understanding of out-of-turn interaction, but also suggests further opportunities to enrich browsing experiences for users.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2003

Designing of a Community-based Translation Center

Interfaces that support multi-lingual content can reach a broader community. We wish to extend the reach of CITIDEL, a digital library for computing education materials, to support multiple languages. By doing so, we hope that it will increase the number of users, and in turn the number of resources. This paper discusses three approaches to translation (automated translation, developer-based, and community-based), and a brief evaluation of these approaches. It proposes a design for an online community translation center where volunteers help translate interface components and educational materials available in CITIDEL.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2003

Re-Finding Found Things: An Exploratory Study of How Users Re-Find Information

The problem of how people find information is studied extensively; however, the problem of how people organize, re-use, and re-find information that they have found is not as well understood. Recently, several projects have conducted in-situ studies to explore how people re-find and re-use information. Here, we present results and observations from a controlled, laboratory study of refinding information found on the web. Our study was conducted as a collaborative exercise with pairs of participants. One participant acted as a retriever, helping the other participant re-find information by telephone. This design allowed us to gain insight into the strategies that users employed to re-find information, and into how domain artifacts and contextual information were used to aid the re-finding process. We also introduced the ability for users to add their own explicitly artifacts in the form of making annotations on the web pages they viewed. We observe that re-finding often occurs as a two stage, iterative process in which users first attempt to locate an information source (search), and once found, begin a process to find the specific information being sought (browse). Our findings are consistent with research on waypoints; orienteering approaches to re-finding; and navigation of electronic spaces. Furthermore, we observed that annotations were utilized extensively, indicating that explicitly added context by the user can play an important role in re-finding.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2003

Supporting Out-of-turn Interactions in a Multimodal Web Interface

Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly important with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. This article investigates systems support for web browsing in a multimodal interface. Specifically, we outline the design and implementation of a software framework that integrates hyperlink and speech modes of interaction. Instead of viewing speech as merely an alternative interaction medium, the framework uses it to support out-of-turn interaction, providing a flexibility of information access not possible with hyperlinks alone. This approach enables the creation of websites that adapt to the needs of users, yet permits the designer fine-grained control over what interactions to support. Design methodology, implementation details, and two case studies are presented.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2002

Annotations for HTML to VoiceXML Transcoding: Producing Voice WebPages with Usability in Mind

Web pages contain a large variety of information, but are largely designed for use by graphical web browsers. Mobile access to web-based information often requires presenting HTML web pages using channels that are limited in their graphical capabilities such as small-screens or audio-only interfaces. Content transcoding and annotations have been explored as methods for intelligently presenting HTML documents. Much of this work has focused on transcoding for small-screen devices such as are found on PDAs and cell phones. Here, we focus on the use of annotations and transcoding for presenting HTML content through a voice user interface instantiated in VoiceXML. This transcoded voice interface is designed with an assumption that it will not be used for extended web browsing by voice, but rather to quickly gain directed access to information on web pages. We have found repeated structures that are common in the presentation of data on web pages that are well suited for voice presentation and navigation. In this paper, we describe these structures and their use in an annotation system we have implemented that produces a VoiceXML interface to information originally embedded in HTML documents. We describe the transcoding process used to translate HTML into VoiceXML, including transcoding features we have designed to lead to highly usable VoiceXML code.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2001

Building Multi-Platform User Interfaces with UIML

There has been a widespread emergence of computing devices in the past few years that go beyond the capabilities of traditional desktop computers. However, users want to use the same kinds of applications and access the same data and information on these appliances that they can access on their desktop computers. The user interfaces for these platforms go beyond the traditional interaction metaphors. It is a challenge to build User Interfaces (UIs) for these devices of differing capabilities that allow the end users to perform the same kinds of tasks. The User Interface Markup Language (UIML) is an XML-based language that allows the canonical description of UIs for different platforms. We describe the language features of UIML that facilitate the development of multi-platform UIs. We also describe the key aspects of our approach that makes UIML succeed where previous approaches failed, namely the division in the representation of a UI, the use of a generic vocabulary, and an integrated development environment specifically designed for transformation-based UI development. Finally we describe the initial details of a multi-step usability engineering process for building multi-platform UI using UIML.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2001

A Multi-Step Process for Generating Multi-Platform User Interfaces using UIML

There has been a widespread emergence of computing devices in the past few years that go beyond the capabilities of traditional desktop computers. These devices have varying input/output characteristics, modalities and interaction mechanisms. However, users want to use the same kinds of applications and access the same data and information on these appliances that they can access on their desktop computers. The user interfaces for these devices and platforms go beyond the traditional interaction metaphors. It is a challenge to build User Interfaces (UIs) for these devices of differing capabilities that allow the end users to perform the same kinds of tasks. The User Interface Markup Language (UIML) is an XML-based language that allows the canonical description of UIs for different platforms. We present a multi-step transformation-based framework for building Multi-Platform User Interfaces using UIML. We describe the language features of UIML that facilitate the development of multi-platform UIs, the multi-step process involved in our framework and the transformations needed to build the UIs.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2001

Mixed-Initiative Interaction = Mixed Computation

We show that partial evaluation can be usefully viewed as a programming model for realizing mixed-initiative functionality in interactive applications. Mixed-initiative interaction between two participants is one where the parties can take turns at any time to change and steer the flow of interaction. We concentrate on the facet of mixed-initiative referred to as `unsolicited reporting' and demonstrate how out-of-turn interactions by users can be modeled by `jumping ahead' to nested dialogs (via partial evaluation). Our approach permits the view of dialog management systems in terms of their native support for staging and simplifying interactions; we characterize three different voice-based interaction technologies using this viewpoint. In particular, we show that the built-in form interpretation algorithm (FIA) in the VoiceXML dialog management architecture is actually a (well disguised) combination of an interpreter and a partial evaluator.

cs.PL↗