DESIGN THINKING | A toolset for developers of interactive information visualization

DESIGN THINKING

a toolset for developers of interactive information visualization applications Autore: Gessica Puri Tutor: Andrea Vian Co-tutor: Raffaella Fagnoni

DESIGN THINKING

a toolset for developers of interactive information visualization applications Autore: Gessica Puri Tutor: Andrea Vian Co-tutor: Raffaella Fagnoni

iv | v

premessa

La tecnologia ci offre, oggi, strumenti potentissimi, grazie ai quali siamo in grado di svolgere, verosimilmente con maggiore facilità, risultati migliori e spesso in tempi ridotti, innumerevoli compiti, alcuni dei quali addirittura tempo fa neanche ipotizzabilii. E' altrattanto vero che molti dei quesiti e molte delle problamatiche che la tecnologia si affanna a dipanare, nascono e crescono proprio in seno e a causa delle stesse tecnologie, mi riferisco, ad esempio all'accumularsi di dati e informazioni digitali che la società, definita appunto “dell'informazione,” sta sperimentando. Tuttavia, come vedremo, è anche grazie agli studi fatti in questi ambiti, sulle questioni sorte con la rivoluzione digitale, che è stato possibile progettare e sviluppare nuove applicazioni, utili in tutti i settori economico-produttivi.

Nella maggior parte dei casi, l'indroduzione di nuovi prodotti tecnologici è frutto di studi e ricerche di settore i cui risultati, da un punto di vista tecnico e ingegneristico, sono sinceramente strabilianti, meno frequentemente, invece, l'invenzione di tali prodotti innovativi è guidata da una esigenza reale della comunità sociale o di un settore di questa, al punto che a volte ci si trova a domandarsi se davvero ve ne era bisogno.

Se il settore militare è al primo posto all'avanguardia tecnologica, grazie alla disponibilità di budget ineguagliabili, e alle ricerche sviluppate per scopi legati allo stesso ambito, il settore dell'entertainment è il primo a sfrutttarne le conquiste, basti pensare alla qualità tecnologica dei nuovi giochi per trovare risposte finora nascoste.

Per introdurre le motivazioni da cui muove la presente ricerca

si farà quì uso di alcuni, e tra i più importanti, di quegli stessi strumenti di progetto studiati e analizzati nei capitoli che seguono: la visualizzazione e lo scenario.

Per capire, dunque quali domande hanno motivato la ricerca ed il percorso descritto in questa tesi è necessario che vi racconti una esperienza realmente avvenuta e che probabilmente si ripete, quantomeno simile, in numerose, se non tutte le altre ricerche scientifiche.

Qualche anno fa, infatti, partecipai come volontario ad una ricerca nazionale, promossa dall'istituto San Martino di Genova (Per ragioni di privacy non verranno forniti ulteriori dettagli che sarebbero altresì poco significativi per la comprensione della situazione e per l'obiettivo quì inteso).

La ricerca “in doppio cieco” prevedeva che venissero intervistate un numero predeterminato di “cavie” (50 individui per ciascuno dei molti centri di ricerca partecipanti dislocati sul territorio italiano). I volontari venivano selezionati e contattati in base alla rispondenza ad una determinata serie di caratteristiche fisiche (fascia d'età, abilità fisiche non compromesse, localizzazione geografica, patologie, etc).

Le prime informazioni, raccolte in occasione dell'intervista attraverso un formulario prestampato, da compilare a cura del volontario, erano di carattere generale e riguardavano principalmente informazioni più dettagliate sulla corporatura (altezza, peso etc) e sulle abitudini quotidiane e lo stile di vita dell'intervistato (dieta variegata o vegetariana, pratica sport, fumatore/trice, vita sedentaria, tipo di impiego, malattie infantili, vaccini, uso di alcool, uso di medicinali, tipo di vita sociale, attività sessuale, etc).

Nella seconda fase dell'intervista il volontario veniva sottoposto dal ricercatore ad una serie di test lingustici e mnemonici. I risultati ottenuti e le risposte venivano annotate dall’intervistatore sulla scheda del volontario.

La terza fase prevedeva l'utilizzo di uno strumento tecnologico dotato di un dispositivo di input (una “cloche” con 4 pulsanti direzionali e un pulsante centrale per consentire lo stop dell'azione e un pulsante verde per il comando “invio”) e un monitor su cui venivano proiettate immagini o semplici stimoli visivi. Il volontario doveva interagire, secondo le istruzioni impartitegli, a volte premendo uno dei pulsanti a disposizione in base all'azione richeista, altre volte utilizzando il pulsante “invio” per indicare di aver visualizzato, nel più breve tempo possibile, una luce comparsa su una porzione del monitor. Tutti questi dati, incluse le fasi temporali richieste per completare ciascuna delle attività sottoposte, venivi | vii

vano registrati automaticamente dallo strumento e archiviati su una memoria locale.

Una quarta fase prevedeva l'interazione tra le tre figure coinvolte: lo strumento che proiettava le immagini, il ricercatore che le sceglieva e annotava la risposta sulla scheda e il volontario che eseguiva il compito assegnatogli e rispondeva come indicato.

L'ultima fase consisteva in un monitoraggio delle aree cerebrali attivate in risposta a diversi stimoli (udivi e visivi) inviati da un altro differente apparecchio elettronico. Infine tramite RMN (Risonanza Magnetica Nucleare) una verifica delle caratteristiche della struttura cerebrale del volontario.

Anche ammettendo che la sperimentazione si sia svolta, nei diversi centri e in ciascuna delle giornate, in ambiente neutrale e non incidente sulle prestazioni del volontario e che le condizioni psicologiche ed emotive di ciascun soggetto non siano state prese in considerazione per scelta consapevole o non fossero influenti (ad esempio quante ore aveva dormito la notte prima, sta attraversando un periodo particolarmente stressante o ha difficoltà familiari, è depresso, preoccupato, nervoso o rilassato di fronte ai dispositivi in uso e infinite altre variabili più difficilmente categorizzzabil) è evidente che il quadro finale dei dati raccolti debba essere stato, comunque, alquanto complesso ed eterogeneo.

In maniera prepotente, alla luce di questo quadro si impone il quesito: come verranno trattati tutti quei dati? È presumibile che per ciascuno dei volontari coinvolti in ciascuno dei centri, sia stato fatto, innanzi tutto, un lavoro di digitalizzazione delle diverse informazioni, annotate in formato cartaceo (l'oggettività dei dati era garantita dall'utilizzo di formulari schematici da completare, per evitare che il giudizio individuale del singolo ricercatore potesse influenzare il risultato della sperimentazione e il quadro generale). Tipicamente in queste fasi si fa uso di uno dei tool di gestione di database oggi disponibili (Excel ad esempio). Sono quindi, probabilmente, stati organizzati file completi delle schede individuali di ogni volontario comprensivi di immagini, informazioni tecniche, dati personali e risultati dei test.

Le schede devono essere state quindi coinvogliate in un database collettivo per ciascuno dei centri e tutti i file devono essere poi stati raccolti in un archivio centrale e integrati con quelli di ciascun centro. A questo punto un ricercatore si sarà occupato di iniziare l'analisi delle informazioni raccolte.

Questo lavoro asincrono (svolto cioè in un secondo tempo

rispetto ai diversi momenti in cui è avvenuta la raccolta) di sistematizzazione dei dati sarà certamente avvenuto su un computer in una postazione di lavoro individuale.

I complicati database realizzati, contenenti un elevato numero di record e campi, difficilmente sono in grado di mostrare tendenze, (ad esempio i soggetti fumatori risultano avere reagito agli stimoli visivi in maniera più lenta rispetto ai non fumatori o i soggetti di sesso femminile risultano essere stati meno bravi dei soggetti maschili nel memorizzare certe categorie di sostantivi etc), pattern (tutti i soggetti coinvoltidi di età inferiore ai 35 anni hanno fermato il dispositivo ad un certo punto specifico etc ), aspetti comuni o dissonanze tra le categorie, tra i diversi individui o tra i diversi centri. Per questi scopi il ricercatore deve essersi avvalso di tools di visualizzazioni grafiche, molti dei quali reperibili online o già a disposizione nei laboratori e centri di ricerca e comunemente sfruttati in ambito statistico e scientifico.

Non è necessario procedere oltre per rendersi conto del frammentato puzzle di informazioni e strumenti che oggi costituisce lo scenario di una ricerca e di quanto possa essere utile uno strumento in grado di semplificare e migliorare questo tipo di lavoro.

Uno strumento, ad esempio, che metta a disposizione in tempo reale e simultaneamente il progresso e l'aggiornamento dei dati raccolti, delle schede individuali integrate delle immagini a disposizione, che conssenta la condivisione dello stato dell'arte tra i differenti centri, e la collaborazione tra i ricercatori, che fornisca un accesso ad una libreria incrementabile della letteratura di riferimento, che sia in grado di mostrare il mutare delle visualizzazioni delle informazioni inserite e di consentirne l'interazione e la modifica, che supporti il confronto con altre ricerche nello stesso settore e possa essere condiviso da più centri messi in condizione di lavorare sinergicamente.

Uno strumento di ricerca, in grado di mostrare già in corso d'opera, e non solo alla fine della raccolta dei dati, se la ricerca condotta è lacunosa o imprecisa in qualche informazione consentendo di migliorarla e perfezionarla, o se evidenzia delle informazioni rilevanti consentendo di avanzare ipotesi da verificare in itinere o verificare nuove informazioni da integrare.

Uno strumento in grado, magari, di mettere il ricercatore sempre di fronte all'individuo, con la sua personalità e le sue peculiarità specifiche forse altrettanto rilevanti del profilo disegnato grazie ad un freddo insieme di dati e comunque viii | ix

di certo in grado di tenere focalizzato il ricercatore sulla reale utilità della sua attività, aspetto che potrebbe invece perdersi in mezzo a numeri, percentuali, aggettivi, lastre e software da gestire.

La situazione appena narrata può sembrare molto specifica e settoriale ma le potenzialità di simili strumenti sono evidenti. Infatti la disciplina in cui le applicazioni che verranno studiate possono essere applicate non rappresenta, in particolare a questo livello, un valore determinante; i principi sono identici nei differenti settori e, pur rimanendo ogni situazione un caso a se stante, da affrontare in maniera mirata, la vera discriminante è costituita dalla tipologia di informazioni con le quali si ha a che fare e il modo di organizzarle.

Queste motivazioni personali hanno dato il via al percorso di ricerca affrontato.

L’elaborato che segue racconta il processo di ricerca svolto, il cui obiettivo era comprendere lo stato dell’arte e le problematiche relative all’elaborazione di applicazioni di visualizzazione di informazioni e, in particolare, definire quale potesse essere il mio contributo e quindi il contributo del design in questo settore.

L’esperienza di collaborazione con un team di ricerca in Francia ha permesso di rilevare le potenzialità del desginthinking e le opportunità di sviluppo progettuale e di ricerca generate dalla collaborazione multidisciplinare tra designer e ingegneri.

Le sessioni in lingua inglese sono stati elaborate sulla base di un report del lavoro svolto durante questa collaborazione.

Per agevolare la lettura complessiva ogni sessione è introdotta da un breve abstract, in italiano, dei contenuti del testo principale.

x | xi

acknowledgments

I want to sincerely thank for his inspiring collaboration and attentive patience Prof Giboin whose precious suggestions and recommendations allowed this research; thanks to the long time taking meetings with him and with his guide I could not only elaborate the present result but, most important, understand research methodology and resources and learn very much on the beauty of brain collaborative work and the importance of confident attitude.

I also thank Prof Gandon for giving me the opportunity of doing this visiting period experience at INRIA. I am thankful to all the 4th floor researchers and all the WIMMICS team for their pleasant wellcome in the group and their help, especially Zeina, Rakeb, Maxime, Frederique and Christian also for their helpfulness in participating to the test for the evaluation.

A special thank to Nicolas Marie for the Discovery Hub and for letting me work on his project with enthusiasm and nice participation.

Thanks to all the ADD group, to all the colleagues.

Thanks Prof Vian for believing in me and for your support and friendship.

Thanks Prof Fagnoni for letting me discover design-thinking inside me and apply it to any project.

Thanks Prof Musio-Sale for your appreciation and for your kind suggestions.

And most important thank you mum for your love and support and for “changing the wheels�.

ABSTRACT The research is focused on the importance of user-centred, contextualized approach in the design process of interactive applications of information visualization, aiming to define what can be an important contribute of design discipline in this area.

This research experience can be a useful contribute to the definition of a model of collaborative multidisciplinary process among design and information or knowledge engineering.

The contribute that design activities can bring to application development is not limited to the results of the projects, even if the importance of the aesthetic should not be ignored, as confirmed by emotional design researches. Its value, can be found, in the approach to a project (design in fact), in the strategy, method and tools to face the process.

The goal of the research was to investigate and evaluate if and how design-thinking can be exploited, firstly to boost developers and researchers awareness of end-users' profile and mental models to optimize the design of the application that fully take advantage of its potentialities and features to best meet the users' goals and satisfy both their cognitive and emotional needs.

To this purpose a design-thinking toolset, here described, has been conceived to be used in different steps of the application design process. The core part of the toolset are design frameworks, based on inquiry-method, conceived to

xii | xiii

ABSTRACT La presente ricerca è focalizzata sull’importanza di agevolare un approccio user-centred al processo di sviluppo di applicazioni interattive di visualizzazioni di informazioni e intende aiutare a definire quale sia il valore delle discipline del design in questo settore.

L’esperienza di questa ricerca può essere utilmente letta come un contributo alla definizione di modelli di processi collaborativi multidisciplinari tra le discipline del design e dell’ignegneria informatica e della conoscenza.

Il contributo del design non è limitato al risultato, anche estetico del progetto, per quanto non sia un fattore da trascurare alla luce delle osservazioni sul design emozionale. Più rilevante, tuttavia, può essere il valore delle strategie, dei metodi e degli strumenti impiegati dalla disciplina per affrontare il processo di design.

L’obiettivo è indagare e verificare come il design-thinking possa essere prezioso, innanzi tutto per supportare la necessità di consapevolezza nei ricercatori e sviluppatori del profilo e dei modelli mentali dell’utente finale, per sfruttare al meglio le potenzialità e le funzionalità del sistema, per soddisfare gli obiettivi e le esigenze cognitive ed emozionali dell’utente.

A questo scopo è stato sviluppato un design-thinking toolset, quì descritto, utile in diverse fasi del processo, il cui elemento centrale è costituito da “design frameworks”, basati su un metodo collaborativo dialettico, proposti per assistere lo sviluppare nel tracciare scenari d’uso user-centred e

assist the developers tracing user-centred, contextualized scenarios of use.

The research saw two evaluation steps held on a case study, a prototype of an online discovery engine, Discovery Hub based on semantic ontologies on top of Dbpedia and Wikipedia data.

The results of the first step performed to evaluate the frameworks, evidenced that the main application problems that emerged depend on user cognitive and emotional issues and that user profile, influenced by the context of use, and mental models play a significant role in the effectiveness of allowing the understanding both the application functionalities and the data representations.

This confirms the hypothesis that user-centred scenario, could help optimizing the system comprehension and usability and prevent the main problems highlighted and that the design frameworks proposed are useful to comprehend the problems from the user point of view and to suggest recommendations and mockups for the system and the interaction redesign.

The second step of the evaluation involved the direct collaboration of the developers in the re-design phase of the application development process. The goal of this step was to verify the usability and the effectiveness in boosting end-user awareness, highlighting strong and weak points of the frameworks, of the toolset and of the proposed inquiry process.

The toolset was proved to be useful to define users’ goals (conscious and uncoscious) to fully understand the system potentialities and to plan how the application functionalities must be designed to satisfy and best meet users’s goals for an optimised experience that take into consideration the complexity of the variables involved.

KEYWORDS

design-thinking, inquiry method, interactive application, information visualization, scenario, user-centred collaborative design process

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contestualizzati.

Due fasi di valutazione del toolset sono state effettuate su un caso studio, il prototipo di un motore di scoperta online, Discovery Hub, basato su ontologie semantiche di dati provenienti da Dbpedia e Wikipedia nello step del processo di design del sistema, definito “prototype & test”.

L’analisi dei risultati della prima fase di valutazione ha evidenziato che i principali problemi degli utenti dipendono da fattori di tipo cognitivo ed emozionale e che il modello mentale e quindi il profilo utente e il contesto d’utilizzo, giocano un ruolo fondamentale nella comprensione sia delle funzionalità dell’applicazione che delle informazioni visualizzate, confermando l’ipotesi di ricerca.

I design frameworks proposti hanno dimostrato di essere utili per comprendere i problemi dal punto di vista dell’utente e per suggerire raccomandazioni e indicazioni per il redesign del sistema e dell’interfaccia.

La seconda fase di valutazione, svolta con la collaborazione dei ricercatori ideatori e sviluppatori del prototipo, aveva come scopo testare l’usabilità del toolset e verificare l’efficacia dei frameworks e del processo di design-thinking proposti nell’agevolare la consapevolezza dell’utente finale, evidenziandone i punti di forza e di debolezza per ottimizzare e proporre un modello collaborativo soddisfacente e sostenibile.

Il toolset ha dimostrato essere utile per fissare gli obiettivi conoscitivi dell’utente e le sue esigenze cognitive ed emozionali e per comprendere le potenzialità dell’applicazione. Ha inoltre permesso di individuare proposte per il redesign delle funzionalità e dell’interfaccia per progettare una esperienza utente soddisfacente tenendo conto della complessità delle variabili in gioco.

PAROLE CHIAVE

design-thinking, metodo dialettico, applicazioni interattive, visualizzazione di informazioni, uomo al centro del progetto, scenario, design dei processi collaborativi

RESEARCH QUESTION What can be the value of design disciplines to the design of interactive applications of information visualization?

What contribute could design disciplines bring within a project team of such applications?

DEFINITION OF THE PROBLEM In the design process of an application of information visualization the developer tends to lose the awareness of the end user and the process become system centred instead od user-centred.

RESEARCH HYPOTHESIS Approach, methods, strategies and tools of design disciplines referred to as “design-thinking” can be effectively exploited in user-centered design of information visualization applications.

The complex system of elements and skills innate to design, can be precious to support, proactively, the focus on users’ goals, needs and motivations, taking into account both the cognitive aspects and that emotional ones involved in the comprehension of an information visualization and in the interaction with the application. Design thinking can drive the design choices of the developers towards more effective results also from usability point of view.

GOALS define, implement, apply and validate a design-thinking toolset for developers of information visualization to help streamline the user-centred context-aware design process.

METHOD Qualitative research - design-thinking in action

TOOLS

Design frameworks - scientific literature - interviews participative observation - case study - prototype - test and evaluation - visual thinking - taxonomies xvi | xvii

DOMANDE DI RICERCA Quale può essere il valore del design per la progettazione di visualizzazioni interattive di informazioni?

Quale contributo possono portare le discipline del design all'interno di un team di progetto di tali applicazioni?

DEFINIZIONE DEL PROBLEMA Nel processo di design di una applicazione di visualizzazione di informazioni lo sviluppatore tende a perdere la consapevolezza dell'utente finale.

IPOTESI DI RICERCA L'approccio, il metodo, le strategie e gli strumenti propri delle discipline del design definiti "design-thinking" possono essere efficacemente sfruttati nella progettazione usercentred di applicazioni di visualizzazione di informazioni.

Il complesso sistema di elementi, abilità e competenze propri del design, possono essere preziosi per focalizzare, in modo proattivo, gli obiettivi e le motivazioni degli utenti finali, prendendo in considerazione sia gli aspetti cognitivi che quelli emotivi coinvolti nella fruizione delle informazioni e nell'interazione con l'applicazione guidando le scelte progettuali degli sviluppatori verso risultati più efficaci e consapevoli anche dal punto di vista dell'usabilità.

OBIETTIVI

Definire, implementare, applicare e valutare un designthinking toolset utile al team di progetto per ottimizzare il processo di design contestualizzato e centrato sull'utente.

METODO Ricerca qualitativa - design-thinking in action

STRUMENTI

Design frameworks - letteratura specifica - interviste osservazione partecipata - caso studio - prototipazione - test e valutazione - visual thinking - taxonomie

indice dei contenuti How Why Where When

Related works

What

Background

Who Hypothesis

SEARCH 49 | 68

Problem

DEFINE

PREMESSA

v | ix

RINGRAZIAMENTI ABSTRACT

01 | 48

xi

xii | xvi

CHIAVI DELLA RICERCA xvi | xvii INDICE DEI CONTENUTI xviii | xix

Method & Materials

IDEATE

69 | 84

Further work Considerazioni finali Evaluation - 2nd step Evaluation - 1st step

Inquiry process

Evaluation

Heuristics Templates Design frameworks

PROTOTYPE

TEST

Usability is sustainability

LEARN

199 | 214

119 | 198

85 | 118

APPENDIX

215 | 222

BIBLIOGRAFIA CITATA

223 | 231

How 44 Why 34 Where 30 When 26 What 18 Who 12 Hypothesis 08 Problem 02

DEFINE

01 | 48

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DEFINE

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SEARCH

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IDEATE

problem

| PROTOTYPE |

TEST

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LEARN

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In questa sezione viene definito il problema individuato, per la cui soluzione la ricerca ha inteso indagare il contributo del design come disciplina. Nella comunità scientifica impegnata a sviluppare applicazioni interattive di visualizzazione di informazioni l'approccio al progetto risulta essere, nella maggior parte dei casi, "system-centred". Questo implica una debole se non addirittura assente consapevolezza dell'utente finale e delle sue esigenze, anche cognitive ed emozionali. Il prodotto di un approccio non user-centred risulta essere poco soddisfacente sia in termini di usabilità dell'interazione che di comprensione delle informazioni veicolate. Quale può essere il valore del design in questo contesto?

STRUMENTI: interviste - letteratura scientifica - osservazione diretta

Typically the project of a new application starts either in response to a direct request of a client or a partner or from a research idea, in the common case when a developer identifies a problem or an potentiality and formulates a research question and an hypothesis.1 In the first case, when the project originates on commission, the development phases can count on a participative design process, where constant interaction and feedback from the client or stakeholder helps keeping the focus on the user.

"It's easy to lose awareness of the users or even forget them while being concentrated on the coding of an application. This factor can lead to a fail in terms of usability efficay or even in a fail of comprehension of the system functionalities and of the information represented."

system-centred development

In the second case, instead, the developer proceeds to the analysis of the outlined problem or potentiality, operates a literature review and a market research, evaluates the existing resources and works on the development of a proposed solution according to a plan that is, at least at the beginning, "software" oriented. The developer intends to achieve a personal goal, answer the research question and foster an identified opportunity.2 The focus of the job, thus, is on the implementation (coding) of the software, assuming that any generic user will have the chance to benefit of the system developed.

Inteviewing Mr A. Giboin3, HCI professor and researcher, member of WIMMICS4 team at INRIA5 Sophia Antipolis,

02 | 03

"In the research team colleagues see that the product might fail to meet the user goals and needs. Why? what can help to take into account usability issues?" user-centred design emerges to be one of the main issues among the scientific community of developers of applications of information visualization.

In fact, during the development process, even despite the best intent, the “end-user� tends to become, for the developer, a fuzzy, undefined entity, whose concrete behaviours, needs and goals are easily missed, ending up in the implementation of products technologically very innovative, with great potentialities, but that might give a poor, or even disappointing experience to the end-user.

User-centred design has now been a long theorized main topic in HCI4 and widely recognized to be a core issue in ICT vital to effective application development.

"Although the overall growth of information visualization is accelerating, the growth of usability studies and empirical evaluations has been relatively slow. Furthermore, usability issues still tend to be addressed in an ad hoc manner and limited to the particular systems at hand."

Recently user-centred design approach has, also, been proved to be crucial to develop effective information visualizations where, though, still remain a few unsolved problems.6 For engineering information visualization systems two aspects emerge to be fundamental: 1. to take into consideration not only graph-theoretical properties but also the semantics associated with the data 2. to understand human perceptual–cognitive tasks to understand users goals and motivation for interacting with the information.

What can be the an important contribute of the design disciplines to optimize user comprehension of the displayed data, to enhance information retrieval and to improve the whole interaction experience with digital application?

Each and every project is clearly a singular case with specific issues and peculiarities. The numerous heuristics and guidelines (about visualization, interaction, perception, data representation, HCI, etc) are valid and useful support to outline and refine the outcome of the project, including the visual aspects of the data representation, the interaction with the interface and also the aesthetic.

research question

potentialities

goal

goal user

developer

WHAT DEVELOPERS WANT - HOW THEY APPROACH THE PROCESS

goal

SYSTEM

goal

potentialities

goal

potentialities

goal

Researchers and developers identify a technological opportunity. They develop a system presuming that any user will benefit of the product.

goal

U goal

goal

potentialities

U goal

potentialities

goal

U goal

goal

SYSTEM

goal

user

developer

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS

U goal

potentialities

U goal

potentialities

goal

U goal

With a system-oriented developing process the result is that most of the unconscious goals of the user will not be satisfied by the system, developers goal will not match with the user's goal and some of the system potentialities will not even be detected.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS U goal

U goal U goal

goal U goal

goal

goal U goal

goal

U goal goal

goal

U goal

U goal

The resulting situation gets even more complicated considering all the possible users mental models and expectations

04 | 05

WHAT USERS WANT

potentialities

U goal

potentialities

U goal

goal

SYSTEM

U goal

goal developer

user

U goal

potentialities

U goal

potentialities

U goal

goal

Users want to find information and don't want to have to struggle to understand neither the system functionalities nor the information itself.

WHAT SHOULD BE | USER CENTRED developer

U goal

potentialities

SYSTEM

goal

U goal U goal

potentialities

goal

U goal

potentialities user

U goal

goal

U goal

User-centred approach should focus on user's goals to develop the system to meet their goals. The developers should first be aware and envision users' profile and scenario of use.

WHAT SHOULD BE | CO-DESIGN

user

U goal

potentialities

U goal

potentialities

U goal

developer

U goal

U goal U goal

goal

goal

SYSTEM potentialities potentialities

goal

Co-design is a partecipatory design approach to the design process that involves the users and all the stakeholders to the definition of the system.

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DEFINE

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SEARCH

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IDEATE

| PROTOTYPE |

TEST

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LEARN

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The contribute that design activities can bring to application development can be limited and focused on the results of the projects, taking care of the form and the aesthetics of the information visualization that is, anyhow, an acknowledged open challenge in data and information engineering.

Nonetheless the value of design can be preciously found deeper in earlier stages of the design process, in the complex system of operational actions and decisions that lead the process, in the approach to a project (design in fact), in the strategy of ideating, planning, developing and afterwords diffusing/communicating the project itself.

The goal of this research, thus, was to apply design methods, tools and strategies to boost developers awareness of the end-user profile, mental models, cognitive and emotional needs, to help optimizing the design process of such applications, exploiting their potentialities, enabling their features best meet the users’ goals and expectations.

NOTES 1. [20] Dym C. L. , Agogino A. M. , Eris O., Frey D. D. , Leifer L. J., Engineering design-thinking, Teaching, and Learning 2. [46] Moggridge B. (2007) “Designing Interactions”, MIT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVkQYvN4_ HA February 2, 2007 lecture by Bill Moggridge for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS 547) 3. Mr Alain Giboin Researcher at INRIA and Professor at Ecole Polytechnique de l'Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis. Mr Giboin has been tutor and supervisor of this thesis during the visiting period held in 2012 at INRIA in WIMMICS team.

4. WIMMICS - Web-Instrumented Man-Machine Interactions, Communities, and Semantic http:// wimmics.inria.fr/ 5. INRIA - Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) http://www.inria.fr 5. ISO 13407:(1999), titled Human-centred design processes for interactive systems, is an ISO Standard providing guidance on human-centred design activities throughout the life cycle of interactive computer-based systems.

6. [11] Chen C., Top 10 Unsolved Information Visualization Problems

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"

55 minutes defining the problem and only 5 minutes finding the solution

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A.Einstein

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L'approccio, il metodo e gli strumenti progettuali propri delle discipline del design possono portare un contributo fondamentale a supporto di un processo progettuale centrato sull'utente. Il design-thinking può contribuire a chiarire e focalizzare le motivazioni e le necessità cognitive ed emozionali dell'utente finale, guidando la progettazione delle applicazioni agevolando l’approccio user-centred al posto di quello system-oriented.

Applicare framework progettuali e sfruttare strumenti propri delle discipline del design può contribuire efficacemente ad attivare e mantenere viva la consapevolezza e la centralità delle caratteristiche e delle necessità dell'utente finale nelle diverse fasi del processo progettuale, contribuendo così anche a meglio definire e sviluppare le potenzialità di un sistema in funzione dell'utente nel contesto d’uso.

STRUMENTI: design frameworks - letteratura scientifica - osservazione diretta

Design-thinking, considered as the complex set of methods, tools and processes typical of design disciplines can be precious to optimize user-centred approach1 necessary in the design process of an interactive application of information visualization.

Design-thinking, in fact, focuses, in a proactive way, on users goals and motivations, taking into consideration the human cognitive and emotional aspects vital in human computer interaction projects.

Furthermore design-thinking implies a non linear design process, acknowledged to be ideal for user-centred design in HCI2 for it best suites the advantages of elaborating cheap and fast working prototype and couples with most rated and diffused software development methods like, for instance, Agile Methods.3 In this research, I have worked to define, implement, and apply/validate a design-thinking toolset useful to streamline the user-centred, context aware design process of interactive information visualization. scenarios for user-centred context aware development

The core part of the toolset are design frameworks, based on the inquiry-method, congenital to the design approach, useful to assist the applications design and development of the interface and the interaction.

The hypothesis is that to be effective, and prevent main problems, the design process must take into consideration user characteristics, behaviours and specific goals. To perform this task an effective and common tool is formulating scenarios of use.

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SENSO SENS

FUNZIONE FUNCTION

FORMA SHAPE

VALORE VALUE

humanities

technology | engineering

art

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EMOZIONI EMOTIONS

economy | management

F. Celaschi - Il design come mediatore tra saperi Il sistema degli output che la cultura di progetto deve mettere in relazione attingendo agli insiemi disciplinari principalmente coinvolti.

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It is necessary that the development phases start from a user profile identification (WHO?).

It is necessary to have a clear knowledge of what the application contents are (WHAT?) and what data can tell, to anticipate what the user will want to see. It is vital to make explicit the content features to understand its potentialities and fully exploit them.

To this purpose the design will have to focus on the user motivation (WHY?) that can be influenced by context variables (WHEN? – WHERE?).

The developer will then have to establish how (HOW?) the user will act to achieve the goals and thus how the interface can enable the users' goal match with the system features.

The aforementioned 6Ws form the design frameworks proposed.

The goal is to boost the developer awareness of the enduser needs and mental models and, consequently, design the applications fully exploiting their potentialities, enabling their features best meet the users' goals.

As will be explained in the section “evaluation” the results of the test performed, evidenced that the design frameworks proposed are effective in the evaluation phase to understand the problems outlined by the users and suggest usercentred recommendations for the application re-design.

A preliminary test, that helped identify the weak and strong aspects of the proposed inquiry process and of the toolset, also proved that they can be precious in other design steps and that a detailed, user-centred, scenario, traced using the proposed frameworks, could help optimizing the development of the applications preventing the main comprehension and usability problems highlighted.

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APPROACH

METHOD

DESIGN THINKING

TOOLS

NOTES 1. Moggridge B.; “Designing Interactions”, MIT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVkQYvN4_HA February 2, 2007 lecture by Bill Moggridge for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS 547) 2. [47] Nielsen, J., Iterative User Interface Design pp 32-41.

3. [03] Beck K. et al.; “Manifesto for Agile Software Development”. Agile Alliance. Retrieved June 2010 4. [10] Celaschi F., Il design come mediatore tra bisogni, in [28] Germak C. (a cura di), L’Uomo al centro del progetto

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L'esperienza di collaborazione con un team di ricerca francse è stata fondamentale ai fini del completamento di questa ricerca, anche per definire un profilo rappresentativo delle figure professionali chi si occupano di progettare e sviluppare applicazioni interattive di informazioni e che risentono del problema evidenziato nel precedente capitolo.

In questa sezione perciò viene presentata la composizione del gruppo e delle figure professionali coinvolte, rappresentative delle comunità di ricerca in questo ambito del computer science. Viene inoltre citato il risultato di una breve intervista con i membri del team che aveva l'obiettivo di capire quale fosse la comune conoscenza di base del "design" e quali fossero le aspettative rispetto al contributo che il design e i designer possono portare al team di ricerca in questo settore.

Come si potrà leggere il valore del design come strategia di processo progettuale non viene rilevato e rimane ampio margine di miglioramento rispetto alle opportunità di collaborazione e quindi a quello che può essere il contributo della disciplina.

STRUMENTI: design frameworks - interviste - letteratura scientifica - osservazione diretta

visiting research period

WIMMICS - Web-Instrumented Man-Machine Interactions, Communities, and Semantic1 è uno dei team di ricerca del National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique, INRIA2) presso la sede di Sophia Antipolis.

Il team guidato dal prof Fabien Gandon è un team multidisciplinare composto da Software, Informatic e Knowledge Engineers, Esperti di Natural Language Processing (NPL), ed esperti di Human-Computer Intercaction (HCI).

L’orientamento di ricerca del team è centrato sulle potenzialità di sviluppo di applicazioni legate all’ultima generazione del Web, definito Web Semantico. WIMMICS ha come obiettivo analizzare e comprendere come l’immensa rete di dati digitali disponibili e le interazioni tra essi possano essere processati ed efficacemente sfruttati per offrire una migliore disponibilità di informazioni progettando strumenti di interazione con i dati e tra le comunità di utenti.

WIMMICS research axis

I due principali assi di ricerca del team WIMMICS sono: - proporre un approccio multidisciplinare all’analisi e alla modellazione dei complessi sistemi di informazione tra loro interconnessi, dell’interazione con i dati stessi e tra le comunità di utenti - formalizzare e riflettere sui modelli per proporre nuovi strumenti di analisi a supporto di nuove funzionalità e una migliore gestione dei progetti stessi.

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Tra le numerose ricerche e contributi scientifici allo studio del Web Semantico, di particolare interesse per la presente ricerca sono i progetti legati allo sviluppo di applicazioni per la ricerca e la fruizione di informazione online. sono un designer, cosa posso fare per voi?

Durante un periodo di quattro mesi come visiting researcher, grazie alla supervisione e collaborazione del tutor Prof Giboin ho avuto l’opportunità di collaborare con il team, assistere a seminari interni di presentazione dei progetti di ricerca e dei risultati raggiunti. Queste esperienze hanno contribuito a far rilevare come, accanto all’elevato valore innovativo, tecnologico e scientifico dei progetti, l’approccio user-centred sia tendenzialmente e inconsciamente trascurato e come l’utente venga preso in considerazione almeno in parte solo nelle ultime fasi del processo di sviluppo del sistema. Una diffusa difficoltà emersa, infatti, è proprio riuscire a vedere e mantenere chiari gli obiettivi finali dell’utente e la reale utilità del sistema.

Avendo avuto questa opportunità di collaborazione, nell’intento di trarre il massimo beneficio comune da un nuovo tipo di collaborazione multidisciplinare, in un team in cui ancora non era previsto, ho indagato innanzi tutto per comprendere quali fossero le aspettative rispetto alla nostra disciplina e alla presenza di un designer nel team.

Perciò, con l’obiettivo di comprendere cosa il design e quindi un designer, potesse fare per aiutare gli ingegneri e in quale modo potesse utilmente contribuire ai progetti di applicazioni di visualizzazione di informazioni ho effettuato una breve intervista ai membri del gruppo ciascuno con differente formazione e profilo di ricerca.

Le domande rivolte nella beve intervista erano semplicemente “in base alla tua conoscenza cosa è design?” e “chi è e cosa fa un designer?”.

"design" e "designer" visti dagli ingegneri

Se una definizione di “design” e di “designer” è difficile da dare per i diretti interessati e per gli “addetti ai lavori” al di fuori del settere la conoscenza della disciplina è decisamente limitata se non addirittura quasi pregiudiziale.

Design viene associato solo alla forma dei prodotti, spesso a forme ricercate e complesse e il designer è visto come un artista, un illustratore o un disegnatore. A volte, in maniera più articolata ci si riferisce all’abilità del designer di progettare l’ergonomia dei prodotti e quindi la forma in associazione con l’usabilità. Per citare Norman Potter “colui il cui lavoro contribuisce a dar forma e ordine a piacevolezze e comodità del vivere”3. Raramente e solo tra chi ha avuto modo di farne

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KNOWLEDGE ENGINEER

“it's mainly the aesthetics, to make things, also the data look good to help the user explore and query them”

SOFTWARE ENGINEER

“design includes several things in software engineering to design is to create the model of the data the architecture of the system contents”

INFORMATIC ENGINEER

“there are different kind of design: for example illustrators are designers.”

NLP EXPERT

“quando sento la parola design penso all'ideazione della forma di un oggetto all'ergonomia”

HCI EXPERT

design is depth first

TEAM DIRECTOR

“design, as an activity, can span art and science handcraft and engineering, considering not only formal rules but also emotional and cultural”

“designers are people who model things”

“designers do an artistic job”

“i designer disegnano la forma nei diversi settori in cui lavorano”

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esperienza diretta il valore del design è riconosciuto nelle modalità di progettare, nelle attività intraprese nel processo di design e nell’articolata attenzione posta non solo alle regole formali ma all’esperienza del fruitore considerata nel suo complesso comprendendo quindi anche quegli aspetti emozionali trascurati da differenti approcci disciplinari. Non sono note le abilità e le attitudini progettuali peculiari delle discipline del design che per lo più, inoltre, si limitano a vedersi applicate alla progettazione di oggetti e messaggi, più raramente di luoghi, quasi mai di esperienze. diffondere e sfruttare il design-thinking

Se è noto e condiviso che “L’ingegneria è la disciplina e la professione che ha come obiettivo l’applicazione dei risultati della matematica, della fisica e della chimica alla risoluzione di problematiche che concorrono alla soddisfazione dei bisogni umani”4 e le abitlità, le competenze e le metodologie di indagine e di progetto degli ingegneri sono già diffusamente applicate ai differenti settori e sono riconosciute e valorizzate scienfificamente anche in termini strategici il design deve ancora affermarsi.

L’intervento e le opportunità del design come strategia e processo progettuale, devono ancora essere costruite e diffuse. Come dimostrano casi studio esemplari (presentati nella sezione “related works”) e recenti pubblicazzioni scientifiche, gli strumenti e gli approcci del design possono ed è auspicabile che vengano sempre più efficacemente integrati nelle metodologie di sviluppo e di ricerca e perfino nell’iter formativo di professionalità in ambiti diversi che vanno dall’economia all’educazione, dalla politica all’ingegneria, appunto.

Per raggiungere questi scopi è indispensabile innanzi tutto mostrarne l’efficacia attraverso la testimozianza di esperienze dirette e attraverso azioni di “research in action” per contribuire a sviluppare strumenti e modelli applicativi di riferimento scalabili e sempre più efficaci.

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"

The designer must become capable of animating and developing an active and innovative mediation system.5

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NOTES 1. http://wimmics.inria.fr 2. http://www.inria.fr - http://www.inria.fr/centre/sophia 3. [56] Potter N., Cos’è un designer. Things/Places/Messages 4. http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingegneria vs http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design L’ingegneria è la disciplina e la professione che ha come obiettivo l’applicazione dei risultati della matematica, della fisica e della chimica alla risoluzione di problematiche che concorrono alla soddisfazione dei bisogni umani.

L’ingegneria, applicando le norme tecniche, fornisce metodi, progetti e specifiche per la costruzione di un bene fisico, di un prodotto o di un servizio, e più in generale per lo sviluppo e il controllo di un processo industriale.

Design (pron. approssimativa: “disàin”) è un termine inglese utilizzato come sinonimo di: - Progettazione - attività alla base della costruzione/realizzazione di un oggetto complesso, materiale o concettuale - Disegno industriale o (design industriale, in inglese “industrial design”) - progettazione in vista di una futura produzione industriale - Il termine viene anche usato impropriamente per definire il profilo estetico di un prodotto (es: questa sedia presenta un design minimalista caratterizzato da linee pulite ed essenziali accostate a superfici ispirate alle forme geometriche più semplici), spesso quindi sta a definire la corrente artistica applicata all’oggetto di produzione industriale.

5. [23] Formia, E. M. (Ed.) Innovation in Design Education. Theory, Research And Processes To And From A Latin Perspective

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In questa sezione vengono presentati le caratteristiche e la struttura delle applicazioni interattive di visualizzazione di informazioni.

In particolare viene introdotto il sistema concettuale del web semantico struttura alla base del caso studio Discovery Hub, analizzato e utilizzato come supporto alla verifica e allo sviluppo dell'ipotesi della presente ricerca.

Discovery Hub, progetto di ricerca di Nicolas Marie, PhD students presso WIMMICS è, infatti, un brillante esempio delle ultime tendenze applicative del web semantico, e delle potenzialità fornite da ontologie di dati per la ricerca e la scoperta di informazioni definiti: motori di ricerca esplorativa e raccomandazione. L'architettura di queste applicazioni si basa su dati interconnessi a formare ontologie che offrono all'utente nuove opportunità di conoscenza. La più comune rappresentazione grafica che consente anche di apprezzare il funzionamento dell'algoritmo di costruzione delle connessioni sono i "grafi".

STRUMENTI: design frameworks - interviste - letteratura scientifica - osservazione diretta - caso studio - visual thinking

"Con il termine web semantico, termine coniato dal suo ideatore, Tim Berners-Lee, si intende la trasformazione del World Wide Web in un ambiente dove i documenti pubblicati (pagine HTML, file, immagini, e così via) sono associati ad informazioni e dati (metadati) che ne specificano il contesto semantico in un formato adatto all'interrogazione e l'interpretazione (es. tramite motori di ricerca) e, più in generale, all'elaborazione automatica."1 Oggi, la ricerca è ancora la principale modalità per accedere alle informazioni sul web. Grazie alle funzionalità dei motori di ricerca è possibile consultare i contenuti ipertestuali, spesso multimediali e usufruire dei servizi presenti in internet. Come è noto, operando una query si ottiene una lista di link1, ormai piuttosto soddisfacente in termini sia di velocità che di pertinenza anche se non ancora perfettamente ottimizzata, a siti che trattano l’argomento di interesse.

I criteri di scelta e di classifica dei risultati dipendono dalla popolarità dei siti cioè dalla capacità di una pagina di “far rete”, poichè quanti più siti puntano ad una pagina tanto più essa “guadagnerà” popolarità. web semantico

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La consolidata struttura del Web basata su pagine HTML, file, immagini, video si sta evolvendo in quello che è appunto definito web semantico, cioè in una struttura in cui informazioni, dati e metadati specificano il contesto semantico dei contenuti che vengono quindi organizzati in ontologie e possono essere divisi e raggruppati in base a categorie, proprietà, classi e sottoclassi. Il web semantico è

quindi in grado di offrire all’utente innanzi tutto opportunità di un livello più complesso di ricerca e fruizione delle informazioni. Inoltre, grazie a questa forma di architettura delle informazioni, il web semantico può fornire la fondamentale opportunità di formare e accrescere la conoscenza individuale (knowledge retrieval) e partecipativa (collaborative knowledge) in maniera più congeniale ai processi conoscitivi umani a differenza di semplici elenchi di risultati e di dati.

ontologie

"In informatica, un'ontologia è una rappresentazione formale, condivisa ed esplicita di una concettualizzazione di un dominio di interesse.

Più nel dettaglio, si tratta di una teoria assiomatica del primo ordine esprimibile in una logica descrittiva.

Il termine ontologia (formale) è entrato in uso nel campo dell'intelligenza artificiale e della rappresentazione della conoscenza, per descrivere il modo in cui diversi schemi vengono combinati in una struttura dati contenente tutte le entità rilevanti e le loro relazioni in un dominio.

I programmi informatici possono poi usare l'ontologia per una varietà di scopi, tra cui il ragionamento induttivo, la classificazione, e svariate tecniche per la risoluzione di problemi."2

Esempio di ontologia

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Le “ontologie”, infatti, che costituiscono la base di questa complessa ossatura, sono state progettate e applicate all’intelligenza artificiale come simulazione delle mappe mentali innate alle funzioni cognitive dell’essere umano.

Le ontologie, ottenute tramite complessi algoritmi di calcolo, organizzano il contenuto di enormi database in base al suo significato e consentono quindi una organizazzione e una categorizzazione semantica delle informazioni che ne permette anche una rappresentazione e una visualizzazione concettualizzata.

Due tra i più recenti e brillanti esempi di applicazioni che sfruttano l’associazione semantica tra elementi sono certamente Il Google Knowledge Graph3 e il Graph Search di Facebook.

Google Knowledge Graph

Il “grafo della conoscenza” (in italiano) di Google è una funzione di ricerca del noto motore Google introdotta il 16 maggio 2012 in google.com, e attivata nella versione italiana il 4 dicembre 2012. Il Team di Larry Page, oltre a sviluppare diverse applicazioni e funzionalità aggiuntive è costantemente impegnato nella ricerca mirata a migliorare la ricerca e la fruizione delle informazioni.

Con Google Now4, ad esempio, “un software di assistenza personale intelligente” implementato per la piattaforma Android avevano affrontato il problema di un interfaccia utente che potesse, usando un linguaggio naturale rispondere alla domande dell’utente, dare consigli ed eseguire azioni.

Grazie al Knowledge Graph (disponibile in multilingua e multipiattaforma) il motore di ricerca di Google è ora in grado associare alle parole cercate un oggetto e di metterlo in relazione con altri oggetti rilevanti da un punto di vista semantico. In questo modo non solo la ricerca può essere più veloce e accurata ma l’utente può più facilmente vedere e quindi comprendere e ricordare una mappa mentale di relazioni tra oggetti interconessi. Questa costruzione di relazioni è ideale per le funzioni conoscitive dell’intelletto umano.

La stessa navigazione all’interno del grafo “che rappresenta elementi del mondo reale e i collegamenti esistenti tra loro.”e l’interazione con l’interfaccia assumono un significato metaforicamente e semanticamente importante, rappresentativo delle azioni intraprese.

La visualizzazione dei risultati e l’interazione con essi, contribuisce alla percezione e comprensione delle proprietà e delle tipologie di connessioni possibili tra i dati , consenten-

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do di scoprire nuove informazioni e contribuendo a formare e accrescere la conoscenza dell’utente.

Il Graph Search di Facebook, invece, come spiega Mark Zuckerberg in una intervista rilasciata il 15 Gennaio 2013 è una funzionalità che consente di effettuare ricerche all’interno delle informazioni condivise dagli utenti della comunità e non di dominio pubblico, nella rete, come altri motori di ricerca fanno. Sfruttando il linguaggio naturale sarà possibile formulare query complesse. Digitando una frase intera verrà creata e visualizzata una pagina contenente i risultati rilevanti. Il sistema sarà in grado di suggerire ricerche e associazioni a cui l’utente non avrebbe pensato, portandolo così a scoprire informazioni inaspettate. Per questa applicazione ancora non è stata rilasciata e messa a disposizione degli utenti una versione deifinitiva in quanto la sua integrazione con le altre funzionalità della community richiede un restyling totale dell’interfaccia che è già stato attivato.

Facebook Graph Search

L’intera architettura dell’informazione di queste applicazioni, infatti, mira a soddisfare un bisogno dell’utente defiGoogle Knowledge Graph pagina di spiegazioni

Google Knowledge Graph funzionamento

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Facebook Graph Search pagine di spiegazioni

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nito, citando le indicazioni presenti nelle interfaccia, come “trovare delle risposte, capire o approfondire qualcosa.”, “rispondere a domande a cui non avevi neanche pensato e aiutarti così ad approfondire le tue conoscenze”, “scopri dove ti può portare la tua curiosità”. architettura dell'informazione

È bene, a questo punto, ricordare che si definisce “architettura dell’informazione”, o “architettura delle informazioni”, dall’inglese “information architecture”, non solo la struttura organizzativa logica e, in questi casi, semantica dei contenuti ma anche la struttura e l’elaborazione dei processi e delle funzionalità di una applicazione.

La scelta dell’interazione tra le informazioni e i processi, svolge un ruolo chiave nel definire il reale grado di fruibilità e di usabilità di un sistema digitale per l’utente finale. In generale la progettazione dell’architettura dei contenuti di un sistema digitale, sia online che offline, incluse quindi le applicazioni interattive per la visualizzazione di informazioni si svolge su tre livelli tra loro collegati: 1 - Struttura: l’organizzazione generale del sistema e del modello di interazione tra le parti; 2 - Processi: i flussi operativi (algoritmi e processi digitali) del sistema; 3 - Pagine: analisi e progettazione dell’interfaccia e della rappresentazione dei dati e dei contenuti e dell’interazione con l’utente.

In sintesi lo scopo fondamentale dell’architettura delle informazioni, come definito da Morville e Rosenfeld, è mettere in relazione utenti e contenuti per il raggiungimento di specifici obietttivi.6 Approfondire le caratteristiche dei best practices, alcuni dei quali quì descritti, valutarne l’usabilità e le funzionalità è stato fondamentale innanzi tutto per la conoscenza del dominio di applicazione e in secondo luogo per chiarire e definire il materiale su cui lavorare. Grazie alle considerazioni fin quì fatte emerge che l’intervento di design deve tenere in considerazione dell’intera architettura dell’informazione. Non è sufficiente focalizzare l’attenzione ad uno dei tre elementi dell’architettura dell’informazione, ad esempio alle pagine e all’usabilità dell’interfaccia. L’approccio progettuale di design-thinking deve indagare le opportunità di sviluppo e organizzazione della struttura nel suo complesso. Il design-thinking come strumento di progetto può contribuire a chiarire come meglio devono essere progettati i processi e l’interazione tra le parti in funzione degli obiettivi dell’uten-

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te. Può quindi supportare la progettazione dell’interfaccia come strumento per il raggiungimento degli obiettivi.

Il primo compito del desgin-thinking è quindi appunto aiutare a definire il profilo utente, le sue aspettative e i suoi goal e come l’applicazione può soddisfare questi bisogni.

Nella sezione “Methods and materials” verrà presentato il caso studio, Discovery Hub, a cui è stato applicato l’uso del toolset proposto. Discovery Hub si basa sulla struttura concettuale descritta per quanto alcuni elementi e funzionalità chiave lo distinguano dalle applicazioni descritte sopra.

Come verrà spiegato nella sezione “Evaluation 1st step” applicare i design frameworks proposti in questa ricerca ha consentito di analizzare e comprendere il sistema e le sue funzionalità uniche e parallelamente analizzare e comprendere le criticità e le necessità dal punto di vista dell’utente per poter quindi formulare delle raccomandazioni per il redesign del sistema.

“Useful research advice on the evaluation of information visualization can be gathered from perceptual psychology, cognitive reasoning research, as well as human computer interaction research. Many, but not enough, information visualization researchers are already actively engaged in this pursuit.”7 Design-thinking può offrire un approccio differente e frameworks efficaci anche per la valutazione delle visualizzazioni, amalgamando in maniera costruttiva i diversi aspetti da valutare.

NOTES 1. http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_semantico 2. http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/crawling-indexing.html 3. http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontologia_(informatica) 4. http://www.google.com/landing/now/ 5. http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html 6. [57] Rosenfeld L., Morville P., Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites 7. [09] Carpendale S., Evaluating Information Visualizations - Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 4950, pp 19-45

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Il processo di design di una applicazione è un processo non lineare e iterativo. Gli step del processo infatti spesso vengono ripetuti e affrontati in maniera non sequenziale.

L'approccio e gli strumenti di design-thinking posso essere preziosi in diversi step del processo dalla definizione alla ricerca, dall'ideazione alla scelta al mento di riflessione e apprendimento, fatta esclusione forse per l'implementazione in cui viene fisicamente scritto il codice. Il design-thinking toolset elaborato è stato applicato ad una Bversion del caso studio trattato nello step quindi "prototype and test" innescando automaticamente una nuova fase del ciclo iterativo di design che portando a ripercorrere gli altri step del processo ma con un nuovo focus: l'utente.

STRUMENTI: design frameworks - letteratura scientifica - osservazione diretta - visual thinking

As said before applications for information visualization have been, ever since, mainly the result of a research action in the engineering field. For its very nature the main goal is to increase the stock of knowledge relative to the algorithm potentialities, the coding opportunities of system modelling or other technological and mathematical issues.

Hence the process of the experimental development starts with the definition of the problem and with the proposal of an hypothesis to solve the problem. Generally at the beginning the context of use and the user profile are fuzzy and generically specified. The focus of the researchers is on the technological and coding aspects of the system. The research and the ideation is oriented to find and prototype a solution for the defined problem that best matches the technical requirements. At the beginning main constraints, indeed, refers to technical resources and limitations that will suggest the system specifications for the coding and the implementation. This kind of approach is the approach that was defined “system oriented”.

The step of the development process when the prototype is tested is normally the moment when usability issues emerge and the confront with the user generates new issues to take into consideration. This phase, thus, can become the first step of a new iterative design process, advised to be the preferable one by most design principle1, focused on end-user behaviour, mental models and goals that drives to arrive an optimised finished product.

Thanks to these observations it is possible to distinguish two iterative creation cycles or phases: 26 | 27

the first data-centred or system-centred the second user-centred As represented in the schema the iterative design-thinking process sees seven major steps: define, research, ideate, prototype and test, choose, learn and implement. These design-thinking steps are valid for both the phases that will face iteratively all of the steps of the process. In the end will be necessary to merge constrains and specifications that emerged from each of the two2.

For the first phase the learning step can lead to new theories and knowledge relative to the engineering, technological, mathematical side of the product. For the second phase it can allow new reflections and theories connected to user experience and HCI enhancing a meta-research about usercentred design process.

Design-thinking process of information visualization development

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NOTES 1. [47] Nielsen J., Iterative User Interface Design Most common development methodology are: •

Waterfall: a linear framework

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Prototyping: an iterative framework

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Incremental: a combined linear-iterative framework

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Spiral: a combined linear-iterative framework

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Rapid application development (RAD): an iterative framework

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Extreme Programming

2. This approach to the process harmonizes with the most thought and nowadeys exploited software development methods called “Agile software development”. The agile methods are “based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.” http://agilemanifesto.org Hasso-Plattner Institut proposes a fusion of the two processes to exploit Design Thinking interesting aspects to enhance agile development process; “extend agile development processes with elements from the Design Thinking approach to make them even stronger.” http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/forschung/dtrp/veranstaltungen/kickoff/session_2.html 3. [43] Mau B., Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

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Process is more important than outcome.

When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.3

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Il contesto, l'ambiente fisico in cui lavorano ricercatori e sviluppatori gioca un ruolo importante e può influenzare sia l'attitudine che l'approccio al progetto.

Grazie all'esperienza diretta ho potuto constatare che la fase di sviluppo del progetto, di codifica del sistema e degli algoritmi di funzionamento vede gli sviluppatori lavorare in postazioni individuali spesso anche nel caso di progetti collaborativi in cui i compiti vengono suddivisi e affrontati in autonomia e i risultati anche parziali condivisi durante momenti di confronto. Come confermato da recenti ricerche lavorare in uno "spazio creativo" è preferibile in particolare nelle fasi del processo definite "define", "ideate" e "learn" e la preparazione di un ambiente adeguato è importante per sfruttare l'approccio e gli strumenti di design-thinking.

STRUMENTI: design frameworks - letteratura scientifica - osservazione partecipante visual thinking - case study

Il lavoro di sviluppo e codifica di un sistema digitale è un lavoro che, nella maggior parte dei casi, vede il developer lavorare in autonomia, in una postazione individuale munito di un computer e del software necessario alla scrittura dell’algoritmo e del linguaggio di programmazione.

Nelle fasi di definizione del progetto spesso l’utilizzo di una lavagna bianca funge da supporto al brainstorming e per tracciare la struttura del sistema.

Alcune ricerche1 hanno dimostrato che anche lo spazio e l’ambiente fisico possono avere un impatto negativo sulla creatività e sull’approccio collaborativo2, a conferma del fatto che l’ambiente può giocare un ruolo che deve essere progettato con obiettivi definiti.

Le caretteristiche dell’ambiente e degli oggetti fisici possono infatti avere una missione ben determinata; è stato verificato che non tutte le influenze positive provenienti dall’ambiente possono avere un beneficio effettivo nello svolgere particolari compiti specifici.

Oggi nelle aziende più illuminate e innovative, in particolare quelle in cui si fa ricerca, anche gli spazi lavorativi sono progettati per rispondere a esigenze diverse nelle diverse fasi del processo, cioè sia agevolare momenti collaborativi e di confronto che conciliare la concentrazione individuale necessaria.

Tuttavia se è piuttosto comunemente diffusa la consapevolezza dell’importanza della postazione individuale meno diffusamente si trovano spazi che stimolano il lavoro collaborativo, il confronto e il pensiero creativo.3 30 | 31

La seconda fase di valutazione del prototipo del designthinking toolset, descritta nella sezione “Evaluation 2nd step”, è stata utile anche per comprendere alcune dinamiche collaborative e rilevare l’importanza del contesto fisico in cui si svolge la fase di ideazione e redesign del progetto.

Il metodo e gli strumenti proposti infatti richiedono un coinvolgimento degli sviluppatori che l’abiente può contribuire a facilitare.

L’utilizzo di oggetti fisici e concreti (ad esempio post it, template di carta, riviste) ha il vantaggio di contribuire ad allontanare il focus dagli aspetti tecnici e tecnologici dello sviluppo del sistema, richiamando l’attenzione al mondo concreto, all’utente come essere umano complesso e quindi alla realtà d’uso del sistema. Tuttavia la poca confidenza e familiarità con alcuni strumenti può provocare una certa reticenza in chi è abituato a sedere di fronte ad un monitor e a confrontarsi con algoritmi e linguaggi di programmazione.

"stiamo perdendo, con la virtualità, il legame emotivo che ha sempre contraddistinto il rapporto dell'uomo con il progetto"4 Il coinvolgimento e la spontaneità necessari, ad esempio, per scrivere i post-it, alzarsi per attaccarli alla parete, spostarli, prendere un template per appuntare uno schema, sfogliare e ritagliare una rivista per immaginare un utente e tracciare il profilo di una “persona” hanno bisogno di essere supportati da un ambiente idoneo e stimolante, in cui lo sviluppatore si senta a proprio agio.

L’organizzazione dello spazio deve favorire mobilità e adattabilità, l’ambiente fisico deve suggerire una situazione informale senza che venga però sottovalutata la serietà e l’importanza del compito svolto che può essere percepita poco conforme rispetto alla schematicità del lavoro svolto al calcolatore.

Il ruolo del design, per una efficace applicazione del designthinking in questi contesti deve quindi tenere conto anche di questi fattori ambientali. 5

“Un ambiente attivato consente al design strategico di esprimere compiutamente le proprie potenzialità.”6 A questo livello della tesi questi aspetti sono semplicemente stati rilevati nella consapevolezza che lo sviluppo futuro della ricerca e del toolset possa portare ad ulteriori interessanti risultati.

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... progettare una dimensione culturale che attiva l’ambiente, un processo di enactment, come è stato definito dallo psicologo sociale Karl E. Weick, ossia un processo di abilitazione dei soggetti alla condivisione del senso dello stare insieme.7

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NOTES 1. [38] Langley P., Jones R., A computational model of scientific insight.

2. COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT - CoRE http://www.wooster.edu/academics/core 3. [42] Martens Y., Creative workplace: instrumental and symbolic support for creativity, Facilities 4. Bistagnimo L. , in L’uomo al centro del progetto, in Germak C. [28] L’Uomo al centro del progetto 5. [35] Jenkins J., Creating the right environment for design 6. 7. [68] Zurlo F., Design strategico

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L’enorme quantità di dati digitali disponibile grazie alle moderne tecnologie ha generato la necessità di nuovi strumenti di gestione e rappresentazione visuale che ne permettano una semplice ed ottimale gestione, fruizione e comprensione. Discipline diverse quali statistica, information, knowledge software enginnering, data mining, e design devono collaborare per la progettazione di soluzioni tecnologiche interattive che siano efficaci in termini sia di efficienza tecnologica, (responsività, sicurezza, affidabilità) che di usabilità dal punto di vista dell’utente. Interventi di ricerca applicata in questo settore sono utili a garantire la continuità del progresso in un’ottica futura multidisciplinare condivisa e trasversale. In questa sezione viene illustrato il problema dell’information overload e le conseguenze sulla efficacia e fruibilità dei dati e la necessità di una maggiore consapevolezza dell’utente finale nelle fasi del processo progettuale.

STRUMENTI: design frameworks - letteratura scientifica - osservazione diretta

“I numeri e non le lettere di un alfabeto, esprimono il mondo in modo adeguato.

Il mondo è calcolabile ma indescrivibile.”; per questa ragione, sostiene inoltre, i numeri abbandonano il codice alfanumerico per riorganizzarsi in nuovi codici, quale quello digitale.”

V. Flusser 1 la rivoluzione digitale

È convenzionalmente riconosciuta esser stata la cosiddetta “rivoluzione digitale”2 ad aver segnato l'inizio di una nuova era moderna definita “era dell'informazione”3.

Come la rivoluzione industriale ha portato, attraverso l'industrializzazione, ad un'economia moderna basata sul capitalismo, la rivoluzione digitale ha condotto ad una economia basata sulla pervasiva disponibilità prima e possibilità di manipolazione subito dopo, delle informazioni. Nell'arco di sole due decadi, dalla diffusione capillare del personal computer, a partire dalla fine degli anni '70, alla pubblica diffusione e utilizzo quotidiano di internet, dalla fine degli anni '90, l'era dell'informazione, definita proprio dalla possibilità di trasferire liberamente informazioni e di avervi accesso immediato, siamo stati testimoni di una trasformazione della moderna società in una rete di comunicazione globale, che oggi la caratterizza.

Come conseguenza, secondo la sintesi di Manovich "Siamo nel mezzo di una nuova rivoluzione dei mezzi di comunicazione - lo spostamento di tutta la cultura verso forme di produzione, distribuzione e comunicazione mediate dal computer"4. Questa fase culturale che coinvolge l'intero complesso globale della civiltà moderna (restano esclusi solo alcuni gruppi etnici, che non hanno attraversato la

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precedente rivoluzione industiale e che non sono stati direttamente interessati dal concetto di globalizzazione) è stata etichettata con molte definizioni: “cybercultura” (Lévy 2001), “cultura delle informazioni” (Manovich 2001), “cultura delle interfaccia” (Johnson 1997), “cultura di Internet” (Castells 2001) o “cultura virtuale nella cybersociety “ (Jones 1998), per ricordarne alcune.5

cultura dell'informazione

Oggi, si sente la necessità di andare oltre il digitale, di pensare post-digitale e comprendere il significato e le opportunità di vivere in un sistema sociale interattivo, in un'era collaborativa e partecipativa e della disponibilità di una immensa rete di dati. "L'idea che il digitale sia qual-

cultura post-digitale

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cosa di nuovo e di rivoluzionario è oggi piuttosto vecchia.

Quindi la questione per la maggior parte dei ricercatori e dei creativi non è passare al digitale - ma far percepire meno il digitale, e agevolare la fruizione e l’utilizzo di questa ricchissima risorsa che sono le informazioni digitali, sfruttandone al meglio le potenzialità e facendo emergere opportunità di partecipazione e interazione post-digitale, rendendo cioè la tecnologia meno tecnologica".6 Questa necessità si scontra in primis con uno dei principali effetti collaterali dell'era digitale: l'enorme quantità di dati raccolta. "information overload"

Per rendere l'idea della quantità di cui si parla è sufficiente ricordare lo studio pubblicato sulla rivista Science7 (fig ... ) in cui è stato calcolato che nel 2007 la quantità di dati accumulata è pari a 276 exabytes, un'unità di misura dell'informazione equivalente a 1000000000000000000 B = 1018 bytes = 1000000000g igabytes = 1000000 terabytes.8 Se volessimo visualizzare questa quantità con una metafora e distribuissimo 276 exabytes su cd-rom della capacità dei comuni cd musicali la pila generata partirebbe dalla nostra scrivania per arrivare 50,000 miglia oltre la luna.9 Grazie alle tecnologie siamo tutti generatori di dati sia in maniera diretta e volontaria (User Generated Content – UGC), ad esempio ogni volta che condividiamo o “geotagghiamo” (localizziamo un elemento attribuendogli una posizione geografica) una foto, un pensiero o una preferenza su un social network, che in maniera inconscia, in conseguenza dei metadati generati dai nostri comportamenti e dall’interazione con i diversi dispositivi digitali di cui disponiamo.

dati e informazioni

Un dato in se, tuttavia, non è ancora una informazione, un numero rappresenta solo una unità discreta di un contenuto, diventa una informazione quando associato ad altri dati attraverso un processo creativo (di design) che consente di formare ed evidenziare relazioni prima nascoste nella massa di dati in se irrilevanti10.

L’informazione è l’organizzazione dei dati tale da generare e mostrare dei significati, la combinazione delle informazioni che guida a formulare un principio, una teoria o una storia è conoscenza.

La dimensione disarmante del volume di dati che le tecnologie digitali sono in grado di collezionare e conservare è tale da rallentarne e renderne difficoltosa l’analisi e dunque la comprensione e la conoscenza, resa anche più complessa dalla differente natura dei dati stessi.

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Questa complessità necessita di nuovi strumenti di gestione e rappresentazione visuale che permettano di trovare i dati rilevanti, gerarchizzarli e metterli a sistema in funzione di categorie, analizzarli osservandoli nel quadro generale, rilevando tendenze e pattern o discrepanze, estrapolandone quindi le informazioni significative. A sostegno e in risposta di queste necessità intervengono discipline differenti (quali la statistica descrittiva ed esplorativa, il data mining, il knowledge engineering, l’information visualization, etc.) che operano in stretta connessione e collaborazione tra loro, ciascuna con le proprie competenze imprescindibili. A questo specifico settore che afferisce più in genrale all’infografica, nato nell’era digitale, da ricerche all’incrocio tra settori diversi dall’HCI, all’informatica, dalla grafica e visual design alla psicologia, ci si riferisce con il termine “Information visualization”.

infografica e visualizzazione di informazioni

L’obiettivo è “la definizione e la costruzione di soluzioni per la rappresentazione e l’interazione con vari tipi di dati astratti allo scopo di migliorarne e agevolarne la comprensione”11.

Le immagini nelle pagine seguenti sono screenshot di applicazioni online interattive di visualizzazione di informazioni.

"Visual representations and interaction techniques take advantage of the human eye’s broad bandwidth pathway into the mind to allow users to see, explore, and understand large amounts of information at once. Information visualization focused on the creation of approaches for conveying abstract information in intuitive ways."12 Tra i numerosi consultati per la ricerca sono stati scelti questi esempi in quanto rappresentativi dell’ampio panorama del settore nella scelta della metafora visiva e per il livello di qualità dell’interazione veicolata in massima parte grazie all’uso simbolico di grafici. Per quanto il caso studio trattato presenti caratteristiche e particolarità differenti dagli esempi riportati gli elementi essenziali per la soddisfazione degli obiettivi dell’utente restano uguali. Infatti conoscere e consultare simili applicazioni è stato utile, non solo come fonte di ispirazione per suggerire l’intervento di redesign sul caso studio, ma soprattutto per comprendere l’importanza della visualizzazione per semplificare la comprensione di informazioni complesse in funzione degli obiettivi dell’utente. L’ultimo esempio riportato è particolarmente interessante perchè per la sua realizzazione gli autori hanno utilizzato GEPHI (The Open Graph Viz Platform) una piattaforma gratuita elaborata e gestita da un consorzio al cui sviluppo partecipa attivamente anche il gruppo di ricerca WIMMICS e sfruttato anche per il grafo di Discovery Hub.

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www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org The flower concept Your Better Life Index is designed to let you visualise and compare some of the key factors – like education, housing, environment, and so on – that contribute to well-being in OECD countries. It’s an interactive tool that allows you to see how countries perform according to the importance you give to each of 11 topics that make for a better life. Each country is represented by one flower, one topic by one of its petals. The length of a petal indicates the score of the respective country in that topic (e.g. income in Germany). If we add up all scores, we get a toal score for each country. The higher the score, the higher the flower will rise.

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http://tweetping.net A map of the world lights up with a real-time visualization of tweets occurring throughout the globe. the effect produces a constantly transforming image that grows and morphs to mimic a nighttime satellite shot, with hotspots where there are more tweets.

http://intensional.org/rmit_dsc/ This data visualisation was undertaken in order to better understand the structure and composition of the Higher Education (HE) segment of the College of Design and Social Context (DSC) at RMIT University.

The centre captures articulation pathways between programs.

Coloured lines illustrate pathways within schools.

Line width indicates the enrolment volume of the source program in each articulation pair. Grey lines capture existing and potential articulations across schools.

Here, transparency indicates the EFTSL size of the source program.

The chart captures a total of approximately 4700 articulation pathways.

Note that individual program codes have been scrambled for the purposes of this public release.

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http://max-planck-researchnetworks.net/ This multi-touch installation reveals how Max Planck Institutes collaborate with each other, and with their international partners.

For this visualization, we analysed data from SciVerse Scopus for over 94,000 publications over the last ten years. A dynamic network provides a high-level map of the Max Planck Institutes and their connections.

The size of the institute icons represents the number of scientific publications, and the width of the connecting lines the number of jointly published papers between two institutes.

The map of Max Planck institutes on the right shows their respective locations, whereas the world map on the bottom shows the locations of external collaboration partners.

Touching an institute icon on the multitouch screen centers the view around it and highlights its most important collaboration partners, both in the network as well as on the maps.

Visitors can move and zoom all views by touching and ‘pinching’ (moving two fingers together or apart).

The international flow of ideas is represented metaphorically by streams of energy particles, being continuously exchanged between the institutions.

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NOTES 1. [22] Flusser V., Filosofia del Design (trad dal tedesco Silvia Artoni) pag. 60-61 Per quanto, a ben vedere, il mondo sia “calcolabile solo perchè lo abbiamo configurato appositamente per i nostri calcoli (...) pare che esso stesso lo abbia preteso.” Per un approfondimento www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC227258/pdf/mlab000680030.pdf 2. Wikipedia “Con rivoluzione digitale si intende la propagazione a macchia d’olio che hanno avuto i vari prodotti digitali e tutta quella serie di cambiamenti sociali, economici e politici avvenuti in merito all’avvento della digitalizzazione di gran parte degli accessi all’informazione. La rivoluzione digitale, avviata con la nascita del linguaggio binario comune a tutti i media che viene sempre più utilizzato per trasformare i mezzi di comunicazione tradizionali e per crearne di nuovi, ha contribuito a mutare profondamente il concetto di comunicazione.” http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivoluzione_digitale 3. “The period beginning around 1970 and noted for the abundant publication, consumption, and manipulation of information, especially by computers and computer networks.” The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.

4. [41] Manovich L., The Language of New Media 5. http://www.cybercultura.it 6. Tom Uglow, Director of Creative Labs at Google notes, “The idea that digital is something new and transformative is now quite old. So the question for most creatives is not about going digital – it’s about making it feel less digital, about making participation and interaction feel post-digital; making the tech less techy.” in http://www.alpha-ville.co.uk/festival-theme/ 7. “In 2002, digital data storage surpassed non-digital for the first time. By 2007, 94 percent of all information on the planet was in digital form. These were among the conclusions of researchers at the University of Southern California who tried to quantify the amount of data in the world.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2011/02/11/GR2011021100614. html?sid=ST2011021100514 8. [31] Hilbert M., López P., The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information 9. [65] Vastag B., Documenting the ‘digital age’: Study charts huge growth in computing capacity 10. “To know that it is raining in Pittsburgh is data. To understand that it has been raining in Pittsburgh for the last week and you are visiting the Steel City tomorrow is informative: you had better pack your raincoat.” in [37] Kolko J., Thoughts on interaction design 11. [58] Scott Owen G., (1999). History of Visualization. Accessed Jan 19, 2010.

12. [34] James J.T., Cook K.A. (Ed.), Illuminating the Path: The R&D Agenda for Visual Analytics.

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installation for Wikipedia official 10th anniversary party Louis T. Blouin Foundation London Jenuary 2011

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Nella comunità scientifica impegnata a sviluppare applicazioni interattive di visualizzazione di informazioni l'approccio al progetto risulta essere, nella maggior parte dei casi, "system-centred". Questo implica una debole se non assente consapevolezza dell'utente finale e delle sue esigenze, anche cognitive ed emozionali. Il prodotto di un approccio non user-centred risulta essere poco soddisfacente sia in termini di usabilità dei sistemi e soddisfazione nell’esperienza dell'interazione che di comprensione delle informazioni veicolate. Gli strumenti, il metodo, gli strumenti e l'approccio delle discipline del design possono aiutare a valorizzare il fattore umano nella sua complessità (cognitiva ed emozionale) come elemento strategico del progetto.

STRUMENTI: design frameworks - letteratura scientifica - osservazione diretta

Design is a young discipline that undergoes to constant redefinition for what concerns both its role and its borders.

The value of design activities is not limited to the results of the projects1. Its value, more than anything, is in the approach to the process that enables to face a project (design in fact2), in the strategy of planning, developing and diffusing/communicating the project itself and, finally, in the tools exploited by the designers.

Design can be a precious vehicle, as a complex system of expertise, tools and methodological process, able to generate change and progress, in a social oriented attitude coherent with its own rationale3.

As emerged in a project conducted by the Faculty of Architecture of Genoa University4 where have been analysed 50 collaborative activities carried out between 2005 and 2011 by the DSA department with different partners, design (as discipline) and thus designers, can cover three different roles Design Action, Design Direction, Design Activism.

The role of design defined as “Activism” is the one where design plays a proactive role of innovation activator, and problem solver, guided by the result intended. This kind of role is the role, indeed, where the design process better expresses and exploits the design-thinking approach applied to non innate disciplines. Design-thinking refers to the theoretical sum of these skills, methodologies, tools and processes, peculiar of design.

Design-thinking5 as a concept, indeed, has been recently theorized in the attempt to formalize and convey the theo44 | 45

retical base and methods of the design disciplines to high school courses students.

In a second moment the design methodologies and approaches have been proposed to a broader set of issues, in the hypothesis that they can be also effective in particular to face so called “wicked problems” in other segments of culture and society, from business management to school teaching, from engineering to sciences.

"Thus the importance of training extends to new figures; but, at the same time, there is increasing awareness among young people, who are undertaking professional training, of the richness and complexity of the design profession."

The opportunity and the results of exploiting design-thinking to information visualization still have to be investigated and in this field an effective and consistent design solution still has to be found. As stated in “Software Design Patterns for Information Visualization”6 by J. Heer and M. Agrawala “Despite a diversity of software architectures supporting information visualization, it is often difficult to identify, evaluate, and re-apply the design solutions implemented within such frameworks.”

User-centred process is unanimously acknowledged to be a core issue in digital system design and information visualization nonetheless researches are still working on how to really apply it.

User-centred design, in practice, risks to remain a concept with general and nonspecific definitions with lack of easy to apply principles and methodologies.

Design thinking can be exploited to support developers of information visualization in adopting a user-centred development process.

“Applying UCSD requires a profound shift of attitudes in systems development, and our main goal is to promote that attitude shift.”

Design-thinking can be the natural promoter of this shift offering the practical tools and the proactive approach to put “man at the centre of the project”.

how to apply usercentred approach?

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User-centred design emphasizes that the purpose of the system is to serve the user, not to use a speciďŹ c technology, not to be an elegant piece of programming.

The needs of the users should dominate the design of the interface, and the needs of the interface should dominate the design of the rest of the system.

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NOTES 1. [18] Dubberly H., How Do You Design: A Compendium of Models.

2. Design: (v) to work out the structure or form of (something), as by making a sketch, outline, pattern, or plans to plan and make (something) artistically or skilfully (transitive) to form or conceive in the mind; invent (transitive) to intend, as for a specific purpose; plan Collins Concise English Dictionary © HarperCollins Publishers 3. [21] Fagnoni R., Puri G., Sabeto C., Design activities.

4. Architecture Faculty of Genoa, DSA department http://arch.unige.it/facw1.htm 5. “The notion of design as a “way of thinking” can be traced in the sciences to Herbert A. Simon’s 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial.”

6. [30] Heer J., Maneesh Agrawala M., Software Design Patterns for Information Visualization

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Le rappresentazioni come supporto alla conoscenza sono uno strumento antico e già da tempo studiato e riconosciuto essere congeniale all'essere umano e alle sue abilità cognitive. Le tecnologie digitali hanno portato ad una significativa evoluzione di questi elaborati, generando nuove applicazioni e nuove prospettive.

In questa sezione si propone una sintetica rilettura storica dell'evoluzione in questo settore, utile a ricordare e quindi meglio soddisfare i meccanismi chiave dei processi cognitivi coinvolti, i punti di forza e gli obiettivi delle visualizzazioni di dati e della ricerca di informazioni. Comprenderne il funzionamento è fondamentale ai fini della progettazione. con particolare riferimento alle elaborazioni digitali e alla loro evoluzione in funzione anche dei progressi dell'ICT. STRUMENTI: letteratura scientifica - visual thinking

"The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained. But human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities. How have we increased memory, thought, and reasoning? By the inventions of external aids: It is things that make us smart."1 La storia dell'invenzione e delle prime realizzazioni di elaborati grafici come supporto al pensiero si spinge indietro fino alle origini della nostra specie. Ne sono un esempio le incisioni rupestri , che rappresentano principalmente mammiferi e scene di caccia, rinvenute nelle grotte risalenti al paleolito superiore. Oltre a comunicarci la valenza magica e propiziatoria attribuita dai nostri antenati a questi disegni, recenti studi di psicologia e archeologia cognitiva, ne riconoscono una più antica funzione fondamentale nell'evoluzione della capacità cognitiva umana: l'elaborazione del pensiero astratto.

La necessità che ha spinto gli uomini primitivi a creare queste rappresentazioni simboliche e quindi a sviluppare ed affinare le abilità fisiche, le tecniche e gli strumenti necessari per realizzarli, sembra essere stata innanzi tutto una necessità di esternalizzare la propria percezione della realtà per rendere escpliciti e quindi coscienti i processi interiori inconsapevoli che costruiscono la conoscienza.

La percezione infatti è spesso definita come il processo di costruzione di immagini mentali stimolate da informazioni ricevute dall'esterno ed elaborate sulla base della propria conoscenza innata (il pacchetto di informazioni trasmes50 | 51

se biologicamente e geneticamente ad ogni individuo) ed acquisita (le informazioni cioè apprese nel corso della vita per esperienza diretta e con lo studio).

Per quanto sia difficile stabilire dove termina la percezione e dove inizia la comprensione, fondamentale per il pensiero e la crescita dell'essere umano è la capacità di riconoscere visivamente un oggetto (“visual recognition” e “shape recognition”) grazie alla sua forma e di distinguerlo da altri oggetti in base alle sue caratteristiche esteriori.2 Si ipotizza quindi che riprodurre le immagini mentali sia stato fondamentale nel prendere coscienza, ad esempio, di cosa distingua e come sia riconoscibile un animale da un altro e in un secondo tempo le azioni e i comportamenti da adottare in determinate corcostanze, creando così una gerarchizzazione degli elementi sempre più complessa e sempre più raffinata, tipica del pensiero complesso e determinante per l'evoluzione culturare della specie.3 Le rappresentazioni visive hanno portato poi alla creazione di miti e alla attribuzione di significati magico-religiosi, impossibili senza una preformata abilità di elaborare un pensiero astratto e simbolico.

Da Platone (fine del V inizio IV secolo a.C.) attraverso la Gestalt lo studio sui processi percettivi dell'essere umano ha evidenziato la nostra fondamentale capacità di riconoscere e decifrare i segni e sfruttare le proprietà evocative di questi per sostenere i propri processi cognitivi.

L'intelletto umano, infatti, necessita di “appoggiarsi” ad ausili esterni per poter pensare, ricordare, ragionare e formulare

La visualizzazione - funzionalità circolare dell’intelletto umano

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teorie. Il mondo esterno gioca un ruolo determinante nei nostri processi cognitivi e nella nostra abilità di formulare pensieri e teorie4. Rappresentazioni grafiche (quindi anche segni e disegni) e simboli, sia realistici che iconici, sono creati ed elaborati istintivamente dall'uomo per sostenere lo sviluppo della propria comprensione della realtà e la propria conoscienza prima ancora che il frutto di una esigenza di comunicazione. una funzionalità circolare

Da quanto fin quì affermato emerge che la visualizzazione è una funzionalità circolare a cui ricorre la mente umana, una doppia “applicazione” che ci consente in una direzione, grazie alla percezione di “ricevere” il mondo, e comprenderlo attraverso la formulazione di immagini mentali e dall'altra di crearne delle rappresentazioni esterne in grado di ampliare e migliorare la stessa compresnsione.

A questo processo circolare, certamente, si aggiunge un altro aspetto fondamentale nelle potenzialità della visualizzazione. Dal momento che non è possibile condividere direttamente o riprodurre (nel senso di ricreare esattamente, trasferire nella mente di un’altra persona) la nostra individuale visione del mondo, cioè il modo unico in cui lo percepiamo e comprendiamo sia fisicamente che nei suoi concetti astratti la rappresentazione e la visualizzazione diventano anche strumenti per entrare in contatto consapevole innanzi tutto con la propria e quindi con l’altrui interiorità e aiutare a comprendere (ancora una volta) “vedere” il proprio e l’altrui personale modo di esperire (vedere) il mondo.

“Alcune ricerche scientifiche hanno dimostrato che l’80% delle informazioni provenienti dal mondo esterno sono ricevute attraverso l’occhio”5. In condizioni normali e non compromesse siamo geneticamente dotati dei meccanismi necessari alla percezione visiva.

imagery thinking

La visione è la base sia del “imagery thinking” cioè la capacità di immaginare, di formare, nella nostra mente, idee e modelli del mondo, almeno di come noi lo percepiamo che del pensiero astratto.

Le numerose teorie sulla percezione visiva, infatti, sicuramente concordano nel dichiarare che la capacità dell’essere umano di capire il mondo esterno è basato sul “riconoscere” ciò che viene percepito, identificandolo con una immagine mentale. Il mondo percepito dall’uomo infatti è molto più complesso della realtà.

Molti fattori ci influenzano (età, esperienza personale, educatione etc.) poiché, invetabilmente, per poter rilevare

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e riconoscere un oggetto sono, comunque, necessarie sia una conoscienza innata che una conoscienza acquisita, formata con l’esperienza e con il tempo, che non può che essere unica, individuale e irriproducibile.

Il mondo in cui viviamo è un mondo di modelli immaginati, creati dalla realtà. L’immaginazione sintetizza questi modelli, queste immagini su cui si basa l’intelletto.

Vedere6 quindi significa riconoscere l’oggetto osservato e reagire adeguatamente per estrarre informazioni utili.

Si ritiene infati che non vediamo mai un oggetto nella sua interezza con uno sguardo e tendiamo a scomporlo nelle sue parti. Questo meccanismo, che è alla base della percezione di forme astratte, ci permette di visualizzare rapidamente forme sempre più complesse, composte da immagini già immagazzinate e di riconoscere un oggetto dai suoi tratti caratteristici grazie anche alle relazioni spaziali e alla posizione rispetto ad atri oggetti. L’insieme di queste informazioni ci aiutano ad identificare e classificare gli oggetti osservati.

vedere e riconoscere

Già a due anni un bambino sviluppa la capacità di prevedere le conseguenze dell’interazione con un oggetto, ha già la capacità di elaborare concetti astratti ed ha già sviluppato la funzionalità, data da meccanismi innati, di conoscere l’orientamento spaziale, la capacità di apprendere visivamente attraverso l’esploraziione ed esperiementi pratici e di “modellare” il mondo per pianificare azioni e organizzare i propri atti nella maniera più efficace, nel dato contesto, per il raggiungimento del proprio obiettivo.

Bisogna però ricordare anche che le abilità umane sono modellabili e progressive. Il fatto che la nostra capacità migliori e si evolva nel tempo ci consente di elaborare plasticità e adattabilità che ci permettono di reagire in maniera più consona a nuove situazioni e nuovi stimoli (ad esempio quelli provenienti da disposivi tecnologici7).

Il modo in cui le informazioni vengono interscambiate con il contesto determina lo sviluppo intellettuale che non potrebbe svilupparsi in isolamento.

Così come la percezione visiva non si realizza senza la capacità di estrarre le proprietà di un oggetto e le relazioni spaziali con gli altri oggetti attorno ad esso, l’intelletto necessiata di essere supportato da un modello gerarchico con diversi levelli di astrazioni cui attribuisce poi una forma verbale8 e una struttura logica, gerarchica infatti, a gerarchie visive cui vengono fatte corrispondere gerarchie concettuali

abilità umane e abilità individuali

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e viceversa.

Per sintetizzare la percezione visiva si può dividere tra:

emisfero destro emisfero sinistro

processare informazioni

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la capacità di processare lo stimolo che riceviamo attraverso la retina e riconoscere forme, oggetti e scene incluse le loro proprietà e generare delle “rappresentazioni” mentali delle informazioni visive che riceviamo dal mondo presente di fronte a noi. In base a queste visualizzazioni e in funzione di input visivi esterni e da come ci aspettiamo che gli oggetti tridimensionali intorno a noi si comporteranno, grazie all’esperienza, ci comportiamo in un certo modo o modifichiamo le nostre conoscienze

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il processo che ci consente di visualizzare immagini, ricordare o creare forme e oggetti non presenti di fronte a noi ma a partire da un altro input esterno, ad esempio una descrizione e il processo inverso di tradurre una immagine attraverso segni astratti o simbolici

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la capacità di elaborare la visualizzazione di concetti astratti formatisi nella nostra mente o trasmessi a noi da altri stimoli sensoriali (ad esempio tramite l’udito quindi verbalmente o da odori o tramite l’olfatto etc), per comprenderli e poi comunicarli. Questa stessa capacità è alla base della compresnsione delle visualizzzazioni di concetti astratti elaborati da altri. L’intuizione è il risultato del lavoro inconscio di questo “pensare per immagini”.

Gli stimoli ricevuti vengono processati differentemente dai due emisferi del cervello: l’emisfero sinistro, che è la parte analitica e logica del cervello, addetto al linguaggio, elabora concettti puramente asrtratti e sviluppa idee logiche manipolando “segni puri”, e l’emisfero destro, deputato all’elaborazione dei dettagli del mondo concreto (ad esempio i colori) che è anche il centro emozionale, collega i “segni puri”, astratti, con oggetti reali e con l’esperienza. Stabilire questa corrispondenza tra nozioni e immagini è fondamentale per i processi intellettivi, è ciò che ci fornisce l’abilità di usare immagini per richiamare informazioni dalla nostra memoria sulle proprietà ficsiche di un oggetto oltre che l’abilità di usare l’immaginazione a supporto del visual thinking9. È proprio questa funzionalità dell’intelletto umano di processare le informazioni in maniera non verbale10, di pensare per immagini e di associare ad esse concetti astratti che consente di ricnoscere relazioni matematiche, sfruttare e interpretare rappresentazioni fisiche di formule e grafici11

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS FOR INTERACTIVE APPLICATIONS OF INFORMATION VISUALIZATION

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che sta alla base dei processi di problem solving “the understanding process generates the person’s internal representation of the problem, whereas the search process generates the person’s solution.”12.

infografica e information visualization

interazione e interfaccia

Queste teorie e scoperte psico-cognitive sono la base comprendere i meccanismi di percezione dei progetti di infografica in generale e in particolare per le visualizzazioni di informazioni.

Anche se questi due campi concettualmente si sovrappongono, la distinzione tra loro, generalmente accettata, è che “infografica” si riferisce a rappresentazioni visive statiche di informazioni (tabelle, grafici, tabelle, diagrammi, ecc). Al contrario, le visualizzazioni di informazioni sono tipicamente sistemi interattivi di rappresentazione di dati astratti, (incluse le rappresentazioni dinamiche) fruiti e mediati dal computer.

Le applicazioni di visualizzazione di informazioni supportano una esplorazione più complessa di insiemi di dati più grandi sia numerici che non numerici (ad esempio testo e informazioni geografiche). L’interattività è quindi l’elemento caratterizzante delle visualizzazioni di informazioni rispetto ad altre forme di infografica che sono invece rappresentazioni statiche.

L’interazione con il mondo reale da forma al modo in cui esso viene percepito. Qualunque prodotto industriale è infatti “l’artificio” che mette in primo luogo in relazione il designer con gli utenti e quindi questi tra loro e con il mondo esterno.

Il valore d’uso e il significato di un prodotto sono interpretati e creati dai diversi livelli di interazione: visivo, fisico, emotivo e cognitivo.

Mentre con i prodotti e i media tradizionali l’interazione e le opportunità offerte sono stabilite dalle caratteristiche fisiche del media e dell’oggetto stesso, bisogna osservare innanzi tutto, che nei nuovi media un nuovo elemento interviene in questo rapporto: l’interfaccia.

“The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface.”13 “Se nei media tradizionali la dimensione di mediazione è legata alla componente fisica dell’interfaccia, nei nuovi media l’interfaccia si separa dalla struttura fisica del medium acquisendo vita propria. In particolare, le caratteristiche dell’interfaccia dei nuovi media offrono una possibilità di riconfigurazione dell’esperienza comunicativa superiore a quella possibile con qualsiasi medium precedente.

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Più precisamente, lavorando sull’interfaccia, è possibile sfruttare le competenze intuitive degli utenti per permettere loro di interagire senza dover dedicare la propria attenzione al medium.

Per poterlo fare, l’utente deve diventare «presente» nel medium, cioè deve essere in grado di attuare intuitivamente le proprie intenzioni.”

Anche nell’era digitale, tuttavia, forma, funzione e senso rimangono i pilastri portanti della progettazione e il settore disciplinare definito Human-Computer Interaction trova e condivide le sue basi concettuali proprio nei fondamenti della disciplina del design del prodotto e della comunicazione.

Design dell’interazione significa infatti progettare il “dialogo” tra un individuo e un prodotto, un servizio o un sistema.

Tendenzialmente14 questa interazione si esplica nella sfera delle azioni e dei comportamenti umani da un punto di vista sia fisico che emozionale.

“...interaction design is architecture, not interior design. Interaction design determines where the concrete for the foundation will be poured as much as it determines which fabric will be most appropriate for the window treatments.”15 Progettare l’interazione, anzichè semplicemente una delle fasi del progetto, può essere proficuamente inteso come un tipo di approccio di design che guida, appunto, alla progettazione di un compartamento umano e dell’esperienza del fruitore (user experience design).

Questo approccio è in grado di armonizzare completamente con l’esigenza di spostare il “fuoco del progetto dal prodotto all’uomo”, ai suoi obiettivi e alle future azioni che dovrà compiere nella fruizione del prodotto, per la comprensione delle informazioni.16 L’interazione con i nuovi media e la tecnologia è oggi un elemento imprescindibile dell’esperienza quotidiana. Ricevere un SMS, fare un commento sulla bacheca di un social network, vedere il trailer del nuovo film su Internet, ascoltare la musica con il proprio cellulare sono tutte azioni quotidiane che hanno necessità di essere progettate.

Compito dei designer ed in particolare di una nuova categoria di professionisti del design, nata con l’era digitale, gli “interaction designer” è osservare l’uomo e dar forma ai suoi comportamenti, alle sue azioni. Il vero valore di questa attività non è semplicemente un valore aggiunto e incidentale, quale quello economico, ma un valore sostanziale quello cioè di sviluppare progetti in funzione dell’uomo (Human Centred Design).

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Nell’ambito delle visualizzazioni di informazioni, in particolare, è vitale che il design sia experience-centred, cioè non solo in grado di mettere l’uomo in relazione con la tecnologia e di consentirgli di “dialogare” con essa attraverso delle attività progettate ma che consideri anche il coinvolgimento cognitivo ed emotivo che le qualità anche sensoriali17 del prodotto potranno comportare, fondamentale alla luce degli studi sul ruolo delle emozioni nel processo decisionale.

“La maggiore difficoltà che oggi ci troviamo ad affrontare è proprio quella di trovare un linguaggio che si adatti al nuovo mezzo virtuale”

"Computers were not intended to be vehicles for entertainment and content delivery.

Computers were intended to compute."18 Un aspetto fondamentale nel design di applicazioni per l’informazione è proprio la necessità di umanizzarle19 e assoggettarle alle esigenze del fruitore in maniera che siano innanzi tutto utili ma anche semplici, intuitive e piacevoli da usare.

Indispensabile per progettare una visualizzazione efficace è la comprensione dell’essere umano che vi interagisce come ragiona, come funziona la sua memoria, e come prende decisioni complesse in grado di consentrigli di completare le attività e raggiungere i propri obiettivi. Questa comprensione trova fondamenti formali nel campo della psicologia percettiva e cognitiva. In particolare, in ambito psicologico, l’interesse per queste tematiche ha dato origine alla Psicologia positiva.20 Nell’ambito delle visualizzazioni di informazioni, in particolare, è vitale che il design sia experience-centred, cioè non solo in grado di mettere l’uomo in relazione con la tecnologia e di consentirgli di “dialogare” con essa attraverso delle attività progettate ma che consideri anche il coinvolgimento cognitivo ed emotivo che le qualità anche sensoriali21 del prodotto potranno comportare, fondamentale alla luce degli studi sul ruolo delle emozioni nel processo decisionale.

“La maggiore difficoltà che oggi ci troviamo ad affrontare è proprio quella di trovare un linguaggio che si adatti al nuovo mezzo virtuale”.

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Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms.

They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and characterbased languages used worldwide between humans.22

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NOTES 1. [08] Card S. K., Mackinlay J.D. e Shneiderman B., In Information Visualization – Using Vision to think.

Il volume, contiene una raccolta di contributi e articoli scientifici in grado di illustrare efficacemente e in maniera completa e approfondita lo stato dell’arte della ricerca in questo settore fino all’anno della sua pubblicazione, il 1999. A distanza di meno di 15 anni dalla pubblicazione i progressi fatti in questo settore sono stati tali da condurre alla soluzione della maggior parte delle criticità e problematiche, per lo più di tipo tecnologico rilevate nei diversi articoli raccolti. al punto di sembrare in certi casi preistoria della tecnologia. Nondimeno resta un testo fondamentale nella disciplina della Visualizzazione dell’Informazione per comprere le implicazioni di tipo cognitivo ed emozionale e come certe problematiche siano state affrontate e risolte 2. [12] Cheyne J.A., Signs of Consciousness: Speculations on the Psychology of Paleolithic Graphics 3. Un’altra delle esigenze fondamentali che sembra abbia spinto i nostri progenitori arcaici a costruire sistemi sempre più complessi di linguaggio, sia figurativo che parlato, è stata quella di trovare un sistema per “raccontare”, a se stessi e ai membri del Clan i residui mnestici della propria produzione onirica.

4. [08] “this notion is sometimes called external cognition (Scaife and Rogers, 1996) to express the way in which internal and external representation and processing weave toghether in tought.” Card S. K.,

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Mackinlay J.D. e Shneiderman B. Using vision to think 5. [29] Hachen M., Scienza della visione. Spazio e gestalt, design e comunicazione 6. “I see” in inglese “Io vedo” significa anche capisco forma colloquiale presente anche in italiano es. “vedo bene quello che intendi” 7. [65] Vastag B., Documenting the ‘digital age’: Study charts huge growth in computing capacity , 8. l linguaggio nasce dallle immagini visive di eventi quotidiani e i loro suoni, nasce anch’esso come strumento cognitivo. Infatti l’intelletto umano ha bisogno delle parole (come similmente vedremo per i simboli) perchè consentono di elaborare delle astrazioni, di accumulare e preservare la conoscenza ed essendo appunto astratte permettono di esprimere ciò che stiamo fisicamente vedendo. Possiamo quindi operare più rapidamente e più liberamente la conversione da un tipo di informazione all’altra e viceversa dalle parole alle immagini. Una condizione fondamentale perché ci sia un linguaggio è che esista la possibilità di “mediare” il nostro rapporto con il mondo. Il linguaggio sostanzialmente si costruisce su questa possibilità. Esso non solo media tra l’individuo e il mondo, ma come dice Lurija (1974) è addirittura in grado di “raddoppiare il mondo” ed avere un rapporto con le cose anche in loro assenza, proprio perché tramite una parola si astrae un concetto relativo al mondo e per mezzo della parola possiamo richiamarlo liberamente. Vygotskij sostiene che è grazie al linguaggio che l’uomo a differenza della scimmia vede il mondo come una mappa di significati e cioè vede un orologio e non un cerchio con delle lancette (solo forme e colori).

“A human being cannot only describe in words what he sees but can visualize the event according to someone else’s account” From Humans to computers – V.V. Alexandrov & N.D. Gorsky -Leningrad institute for informatics and automation World Scientific 1991 9. [54] Pinker S. (ed), Visual cognition 1. [14] Cornoldi C., McDaniel M.A., Imagery and cognition 11. [64] Edward R.Tufte afferma che grazie alla visualizzazione delle informazioni we “represent the rich visual world of experience and measurement ... on static, flat paper.” (1990, p. 9) 12. [66] VanLehn, K.. Problem solving and cognitive skill acquisition. In M. :I. Posner (Ed.), Foundations of cognitive SC- (pp. 527- 579) 13. Norman D.A., as quoted in Hci International 2003 Proceedings: Human-Computer Interaction: Theory and Practice (part 1), Volume 1 (Human Factors and Ergonomics) in [32] Jacko J.A., Stephanidis C. 14. L’ultima frontiera dell’interazione uomo-macchina è costituita da interfacce neurali Brain-computer interface (BCI, letteralmente “interfaccia cervello-computer”) in grado di mettere il cervello umano direttamente in contatto con un dispositivo esterno (un computer ad esempio) sfruttando gli stimoli del sistema nervoso centrale senza che l’uomo debba compiere alcun tipo azione fisica.http://www. liquidweb.it/it/bci 15. [13] Cooper A. The Inmates Are Running the Asylum 16. [28] Germak C. (ed) Uomo al centro del progetto, design per un nuovo umanesimo 17. La frase “usable, useful and desirable” (usabile, utile e desiderabile) è apparsa in un articolo di L. Sanders del Design Management Institute intitolato “Converging Perspectives: Product Development Research for the 1990s” cit in [37] Kolko J. Thoughts on Interaction Design 18. [37] J.Kolko Thoughts on Interaction Design 19. [06] Buchanan, Richard. “Good Design in the Digital Age.” 20. [59] Seligman, M. E. P., Csikszentmihalyi, M. Positive psychology: An introduction.

21. [52] Norman D., Emotional design 22. [02] I.Arapakis, J.M. Jose, P.D. Gray, Affective feedback: an investigation into the role of emotions in the information seeking

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In questa sezione viene proposta una rassegna dei principali testi di riferimento rispetto al tema design thinking e dei principali risultati della sua applicazione in diversi ambiti di ricerca e produzione.

Vengono descritti brevemente le metodologie e i risultati migliori delle ricerche di rilievo con particolare approfondimento per quelle presenti nell'ambito del computer science e della progettazione di applicazioni digitali.

Tra i contributi più notevoli e significativi si ricorda il lavoro svolto da IDEO, da Hasso Plattner Institute e dal Center for Design Research di Stanford.

Per la rilevanza della tesi vengono inoltre ricordati alcuni contributi scientifici che indagano come il design-thinking possa essere integrato con altri approcci di sviluppo e progettazione di software (eg. Agile methods).

STRUMENTI: letteratura scientifica

Design-thinking refers to the theoretical sum of the skills, methodologies, tools and processes, peculiar of design.

Design-thinking as a concept, indeed, has been recently theorized in the attempt to formalize and convey the theoretical base and method of the design disciplines to high school courses students.

“Design-thinking refers to the methods and processes for investigating ill-defined problems, acquiring information, analyzing knowledge, and positing solutions in the design and planning fields. As a style of thinking, it is generally considered the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the context.”1 The notion of design as a “way of thinking” can be traced in H.A. Simon’s book “The Sciences of the Artificial”2 and more specifically for design engineering in R.McKim’s book “Experiences in Visual Thinking”3.

In a second moment the design methodology and approaches has been proposed to a broader set of issues, in the hypothesis that it can be also effective in particular to face so called “wicked problems” in other segments of culture and society, from business management to school teaching, from engineering to sciences.

Design-thinking is exploited in several, different contexts. A rich range of case studies of applied design-thinking can be found in R.Curedale4 [] with examples of application 62 | 63

methods.

Another interesting and successful example, that must be mentioned mostly for their contribute to the design-thinking development and theorization, is the design firm IDEO founded by Bill Moggridge, director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, lecturers at Stanford University and Tim Brown actual CEO and president.

Nowadays, the concept has been upgraded to an upper level of thinking approach, called by Nussbaum, B., Berner, R., & Brady, D. in [15] “Get creative! How to build innovative companies”5: “Creative Intelligence” that strongly relies on collaboration and team working, considered effective in bringing out a kind of creativity more powerful than the individual one, the collective creativity.

In “design-thinking: A Fruitful Concept for IT Development”6 the authors, Lindberg, Meinel and Wagner, working in a research project that proposes a collaborative approach to creativity for the development processes provide explanations and descriptions of how design discinplines fits to IT products development.

In [9] “Designing for Growth: A design-thinking Toolkit for Managers”7, J.Liedtka and T.Ogilvie provide “a practical, everyday tool from which any manager can profit” that brings design-thinking from abstract theoretical idea, into action in business projects.”

Main design-thinking tools, as emerge from this contribute, are: Interrogative thinking User profiles Scenarios Story telling Mind mapping Visual thinking8 In [10] “Design-thinking Research: Studying Co-Creation in Practice”9, the authors Hasso Plattner, Christoph Meinel and Larry Leifer operate a reflection on collaborative, “co-operative” research held in a design-thinking Research Program,

by Stanford University in Palo Alto and Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam and summarize the results of the second year projects.

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Design-thinking process by Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

As explained and described in the book by C. Nigel. "designthinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work”10, a basic text for design-thinking comprehension, the main aspects of design-thinking are “creative thinking-in-action” and “user-centred design”.

An example of a design-thinking process, could see seven steps: - define - research - ideate - prototype - choose implement - learn.

The design-thinking process as developed by Hasso Plattner Institute of Design11 (img above) instead focuses more on the research moment, that coincide with the “learn” step, split into “understand” and “observe”stressing the importance of users centrality.

Like the design process described by B. Moggridge the design-thinking Hasso Plattner Institute of Design process is iterative and not linear. The steps of the process, within a design-thinking approach, indeed are performed in a non linear way “this kind of process is actually not even strictly circular. They are indeed iterative process, where the design steps can be often taken simultaneously and are followed and repeated in a non sequential order.”

The following statement by Tim Brown CEO of IDEO better communicates the potentialities of Design as a driver to innovation and creative projects. “However when we talk about design-thinking, we do not use the term in a sense how designers (may) think, but of how anyone “should” think while dealing with design problems”12 Indeed thanks to its user-centred core focus, design-thinking approach gained particular consensus in HCI community and has been successfully applied to collaborative projects of interactive applications.

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Design-thinking process by Bill Moggrige

“I also attempted to describe a process which is basically an iteration kind of process, circular, at the beginning you work your way around it but I wanted to be sure that it’s clear that it’s not a slavish thing, you don’t necessarily have to follow the entire cirle, and I took an example, see the green line in the middle, of an actual project and said “ok where did we do things in that real project?” and found that it puns around it looks a bit more like a pin ball machine than a wheel … ” February 2, 2007 lecture by Bill Moggridge for the Stanford University Human Computer Interaction Seminar (CS 547) http://www.youtube.com/user/StanfordUniversity/videos?query=moggridge

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In the paper “Engineering design-thinking, Teaching, and Learning” the authors, C.L. Dym, A.M. Agogino, O. Eris, D. D. Frey and L.J. Leifer13, describe how design-thinking, as a complex approach to problem solving and project-based but user centred system design method, should be integrated into engineering education “to graduate engineers who can design”. Reporting “currently most favoured pedagogical model for teaching design” they evaluate best pedagogical practices of improving design learning” and give recommendations.

In “Design Thinking. Employing Design Principles. Defining Ease of Use”14 J. M. Six refers to Design thinking as an opposite way to proceed compared to engineering. Engineering is acknowledged to be a field which experts many designers will collaborate with. The main differences consist in this: “Engineering focuses on reductionism - reducing a design to its minimum requirements to achieve a goal. Design thinking may be the complete opposite - identifying as many alternative designs as possible that satisfy the most requirements and sacrifice perhaps only one or just a few.”

In “Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology”15 P GabrielPetit explains the step of the design process and the importance, in particular in what he calls the “Discovery Phase” the importance of a clear mind of the users profile, models, tasks and goals.

In “Team Based Engineering Design Thinking” N. Mentzer starting from the Pearson & Young statement “Design is the central component of the practice of engineering and a key element in technology education” identifies quality high school technology and engineering learning and teaching environments to guide teachers in developing successful design teams and encouraging them in their efforts.

The possibility of applying design-thinking to information visualization has still to be fully explored and the research here presented was driven by the goal to define a useful toolset to help developers going in this direction believing in its strong effectiveness.

Finally, being visual thinking vital for the design-thinking but also a core aspect of the information representation here considered, a key text for this research is [18] Ware C. “Visual Thinking: For Design”17 were the role of active vision and the implication on understanding are exposed and described on the base of cognitive and perceptual implications.

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NOTES 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking 2. [61] Simon H., The Sciences of the Artificial 3. [44] McKim R., Experiences in Visual Thinking 4. [15] Curedale R. Design methods 1 - Design methods 2 - 200 ways to apply design-thinking.

5. [53] Nussbaum, B., Berner, R., Brady, D. Get creative! How to build innovative companies.

6. [40] Lindberg T., Meinel C., Wagner R. Design-thinking: A Fruitful Concept for IT Development?

7. [39] Liedtka J., Ogilvie T. Designing for Growth: A design-thinking Toolkit for Managers 8. [49] Nigel C., Designerly Ways of Knowing”: “Designers communicate in a visual or an object language. Symbols, signs, and metaphors are used through the medium of sketching, diagrams and technical drawings to translate abstract requirements into concrete objects. The way designers communicate, then, is through understanding this way of coding design requirements in order to produce built products.”

9. [55] Plattner H, Meinel C., Leifer L. (Ed) Design-thinking Research: Studying Co-Creation in Practice.

10. [50] Nigel C. Design-thinking: Understanding How Designers Think and Work 11. The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (also known as the Hasso Plattner Institute for Design, and informally, as the “D-School” or “d.school”) is a design school based in Stanford University, in cooperation with the German Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam. http://dschool.stanford.edu 12. Tim Brown is CEO and president of IDEO the design firm co-founded by Bill Moggridge, director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, lecturers at Stanford University http://www.linkiesta. it/blogs/design-kit-inspiration-and-references/design-thinking-ma-cos-e-veramente#ixzz2DbAhvqeX 13. [19] Dym C. L. , Agogino A. M. , Eris O., Frey D. D. , Leifer L. J. Engineering design-thinking, Teaching and Learning 14. [62] Six J. M., Design Thinking. Employing Design Principles. Defining Ease of Use 15. [26] Gabriel-Petit P., Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology 16. [45] Mentzer N., Team Based Engineering Design Thinking 17. [67] Ware C., Visual Thinking: For Design

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Method & Materials 70

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method & materials

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In questa sezione è descritta la metodologia di ricerca e le fasi seguite per applicare l'approccio di design-thinking al processo di progettazione di applicazioni interattive di visualizzazione delle informazioni e concepire gli elementi che compongono il set di strumenti e la procedura proposti. La ricerca, nata come una ricerca qualitativa è evoluta come una ricerca applicata definita di tipo "activism". In questa fase in particolare l'approccio di design thinking è stato lo strumento essenziale per lo sviluppo e il completamento del lavoro.

Lo studio della letteratura scientifica ha consentito di identificare una tassonomia dei tipi di dati e dei compiti (tasks) e obiettivi (goals) dell'utente, di confrontare le fasi del processo di design di una visualizzazione di informazioni e di una applicazione interattiva con il processo iterativo di design. Infine, grazie anche alla verifica diretta di esperienze reali su un caso studio sono state sintetizzate e classificate schematicamente le diverse tipologie di problemi dal punto di vista dell'utente e le corrispondenti possibili criticità dal punto di vista del sistema.

STRUMENTI: interviste - letteratura scientifica - osservazione diretta - caso studio - test e valutazione - sintesi e analisi dei risultati - visual thinking

The qualitative research started as a qualitative “action”1 design research and evolved into an applied “activism” research where the role of design became soon the proactive activator of process innovation.

A design-thinking approach drove the entire research process that lead to conceive the frameworks and the toolset can be defined as the result of design-thinking in action.

A preliminary literature review was essential to: - understand the theoretical frameworks and the background relative to information visualization and processes design - form a general conceptual base of the cognitive aspects to take into consideration for a better awareness of users goals and need - identify the main domain characteristics and open questions among the community of experts.

Following steps elaborating the scientific literature reviewed were: - understand and classify the kind of data concerned - understand the user mental models and behaviours and connect them to the use life cycle of the application 70 | 71

These steps led to : - define a strategy to help the developers slide the centre of the design process from the system to the user and boost the user awareness - define design frameworks and a methodology to exploit them - define tools to apply the strategy and the frameworks - prepare a prototype of the toolset - evaluate the tools conceived and the inquiry process proposed.

A first step to define what the contribute of design methodologies and approaches could be, has been apply design thinking frameworks to define the problem, the actors to which the research addresses to and the scenario of application.

A direct collaborative experience allowed to verify and analyse the processes undertaken by developers and outline the differences between System Centred and User Centred development.

An attentive reflection through the entire research course allowed meta-research about the dynamics of multidisciplinary collaboration between designers and engineers and the integration of design education, that could be interesting to develop in further works.

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Taxonomy of data To design an information visualization the first step needed is to understand the different kind of data and the encoding channels. (The kind of data here involved are primarily numeric or symbolic rather than physical e.g. physical shape of a biological or natural element) To this purpose starting from the taxonomy proposed by Tamara Munzner 2 three kind of data were distinguished : nominal/ tabular: spatial data – descriptive data (entities) – categorical data (categories – sets and subsets of data) ordered: ordinal – quantitative relational: objective – subjective kind of relations In harmony with the user-centred approach, each type of data was then connected to users goals, formulating the questions that a user would ask interacting with the data to understand what generates the necessity to see them represented. (fig …)

Descriptive and categorical data: what ? Which ?

Spatial data: where ?

Ordered data: how much ?

Relational data: why ? (why are two items connected ?

What kind of connection relates them ? What is the nature of the connection?)

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Taxonomy of users' tasks and goals To better understand the users' needs and conceive their behaviours it has been useful to organize possible user tasks and goals in a schematic visualization that takes into consideration different factors interconnected and interdependent including the cognitive processes involved in each task and the cognitive ability required.

Thus, starting from the mentioned data distinction, two main aspects emerged : 1. the cognitive process involved 2. the cognitive abilities necessary 3 The cognitive process refers to the main cognitive functions4 and goals instinctive necessity, in human beings, to understand the received input and build personal knowledge.

conscious goals

unconscious goals

The first cognitive goal is to understand the received information. To achieve this goal any human being will seek to achieve a set of unconscious goals.

Users' goals are, in fact, divided into two categories Conscious and Unconscious goals Conscious goals are rational intentions of the user, the purposes that drive the user to satisfy a mindful need intentionally conceived resulting from a thinking process, a intentionally pursued result.

Unconscious goals are those unintentional need of the human cognitive process, instinctive purposes to be achieved to allow human reasoning ability.

To understand any information input, perceived by the five senses, humans need to create mental models, to support memory, and to distinguish and organize the informations.

To achieve each of this unconscious goal a user will perform a set of tasks, for example see the big picture, dig into details, see properties of the items, see the categories and their properties, see the origins of items, etc.

The cognitive ability necessary to this process is the ability of “reading the data�.

At a higher more complex level, particularly when managing relational data, humans will perform an analysis of the input data. For this purpose a second set of cognitive goals must be achieved through another set of tasks.

This analysis can be descriptive or predictive.

cognitive abilities

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To perform a descriptive analysis a user unconscious goals are, for example, create a mental map, organize elements into a structure, (which are at the base of ontology building), draw a story out of data. The possible tasks to achieve this goals are numerous, for example : see the relations, see the relation types, define hierarchies, find patterns, find anomalies and differences, find clusters, cross compare items or categories, find trends and patterns, find unexpected behaviours, etc.

The cognitive ability specifically necessary to this process, other than the ability of reading the data, is the ability of “finding relations”.

Predictive analysis are performed in order to make predictions about future events, to identify risks and opportunities.

This process, requires, on top of the two previously cited, the specific ability of “reading beyond the data”.

As will be explained in the section “templates” the taxonomy visualization can be used in the inquiry process, while tracing the scenario, to answer the question “why ?” a user needs to perform a task and what possible goals has to achieve.

Information visualization process After performing a literature review I have analysed the information visualization design process proposed by B. J. Fry5 that, as he states is, by necessity an iterative one6.

1. acquire – the matter of obtaining the data, whether from a file on a disk or from a source over a network.

2. parse – providing some structure around what the data means, ordering it into categories.

3. filter – removing all but the data of interest.

4. mine – the application of methods from statistics or data mining, as a way to discern patterns or place the data in mathematical context.

5. represent – determination of a simple representation, whether the data takes one of many shapes such as a bar graph, list, or tree.

6. refine – improvements to the basic representation to make it clearer and more visually engaging.

7. interact – the addition of methods for manipulating the data or controlling what features are visible.

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Referring to this iterative process I could point out that the problems the user might encounter refers to one or more steps of the process, hence I have started defining why this problems emerge.

According to the initial hypothesis the mentioned steps must be faced with a user-centred approach.

To decide how to filter, parse, represent and then refine and how to design the interaction it is necessary to know who is going to use the visualization and to define what are the data to be represented and what it's structures could be on the base of what is the user purpose.

Since cognitive functions are influenced by user role and context it is important to define when and where the visualization will be used. For this reason was useful to design a visualization that combines the iterative process with the frameworks proposed.

Problems-analysis Starting from a literature review it was possible to categorize and analyse the problems as follows: From the user side, problems can be distinguished into: COGNITIVE | conceptual interpretation / recognition – personal / cultural factors / too much information / missing information - content interpretation | PERCEPTUAL | visualization encoding not effective – missing elements | EMOTIONAL | personal and cultural factors | From the system point of view it is important to understand what part of the system the problems stand on : COMMUNICATION | misleading elements – ambiguous elements | VISUALIZATION | elements not visualized – not clear – not detectable | INTERACTION | usability – manipulation problems |

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The infografic of a taxonomy of tasks and goals with the references to cognitive abilities required and the possible interaction with the data.

To elaborate the version in the image aside it was used an exel file (see image below) that resulted quite complex and not very usable.

The infografic is supposed to be used as inspiration for defining possible users goals ans how they could be achieved interacting with the application.

As emerged collaborating with developers the distinction between tasks and goals is a main issue to take into consideration and it's not always clear for them.

The taxonomy could be completed and upgraded.

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Visual supports Visual tool 01 – System vs User-centred approach The slides (img pag 24-25 ) represent the different approach to application development and can be used by the interviewer to illustrate to the developer the differences between user-centred and system-centred processes.

Visual tool 02 – Visual tool inquiry method description This digital interactive tool, elaborated using an online tool (Prezi) can be useful to inform the developer about how the collaboration will be conducted. This visual support contains hints for the interviewer to help formulating questions and suggestions about the kind of information that can be usefully collected answering the 6Ws and “what if ... ? questions.

Visual tool 03 – the taxonomy of tasks and goals This visual support can be used in the inquiry process, while tracing the scenario, to support answering the question “why ?” what possible goals a user wants to achieve and “how?” what task will have to perform to achieve a goal.

The taxonomy contains only a limited number of possibilities, that are the most common and frequent, thus has to be used only for hints and for inspiration and could profitably be increased and upgraded with further topics for each case.

Visual tool 04 – fulfilling the scenario

USER TASKS AND GOALS CENTERED SCENARIO

who

what

when

where

why

how

Goals

conscious goals

unconscious goals

Task

Actions

Abilities

Pros definition

description

Problem

user

cognitive

perceptual

emotional

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This template can be use to elaborate a detailed scenario answering the frameworks questions. The developer will use colored post-it to write the answer to the proposed questions sticking them in correspondence to the relative question. The template has been changed from the initial version, because the post-it flexibility allows to reflect better the progressive fulfilment of the scenario and the possibility of adding information gradually.

Visual tool 05 – evaluation module An empty module can be used in the test phase to report the user problem. The module is a grid were the problems can be reported as described by the user, analysed by the user point view (emotional, perceptual, cognitive) and from the system side (communication, visualization, interaction).

The module, exploited with users in the first evaluation step was useful to better understand the origin of the problems that emerged and can be exploited to communicate them to other members of the team.

The discovery hub – a case study For the research it was analysed and used the case study of Discovery Hub . The case study was useful to evaluate the toolset and more specifically the frameworks conceived on this application.

According to the explanation of the author “Discovery Hub is a discovery engine which helps you to discover things you might like or be interested in. It widens your cultural and knowledge horizons by revealing and explaining unattended information.

Based on Wikipedia and DBpedia data, Discovery Hub is cross-domain and works on numerous topics including music, cinema, literature but also politics, automobile and much more. It allows performing queries in an innovative way and helps you to navigate rich results. As a hub, it proposes redirections to others platforms to make you benefit from your discoveries (Youtube, Deezer and more).”7 The hub captures very highly heterogeneous information and It allows performing cross-domain and cross-type processing.

The purpose is enable ta system solving composite, potentially heterogeneous, interest queries.

“To solve such queries we propose a spreading activation algorithm which process linked data in real-time...It is an exploratory search engine offering advanced querying, browsing and explanation strategies for discovery purposes.”8 “The Discovery Hub results space exploration is facilitated thanks to various facets and filters. The classes in the propagation domain are used as navigational items to build facets e.g. Band, Film. 40 results at maximum are presented by facet on the actual prototype. Discovery Hub also proposes a “top” un-faceted results list. We limited the number of facets to 14 including the “top” one. Classes are chosen in decreasing count order.

A set of filters per facet is proposed using DBpedia categories thanks to the query below. To foster discovery we put in evidence categories (i.e. filters) with a low degree by presenting them with clearer colours. It aims to drive user in unexpected browsing paths and thus augments the discovery potential of the application. Filters have a cumulative effect.

Visualization of the semantic spreading activation process over DBpedia

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Discovery Hub Interface Screenshots

Landing registration page

Results - Mosaic visualization

Results connection - Graph Visualization

Result detailed page with links

Results - Cathegories and filters

Graph Visualization

Results - Detailed visualization

Results connection - Wikipedia Visualization

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When a user is interested or intrigued by an item, can ask for three different explanations thanks to three features.

- A feature showing the seeds and results common properties e.g. dbpedia:hometown Liverpool, dcterms:subject English pop music groups.

- A feature identifying and highlighting crossed references in Wikipedia pages between the resources if they exist.

- A feature showing the relations between the results and the query-resources in a graph format.”8 The complex algorithm that enables the spreading activation, described in detail in the mentioned papers by the authors, is not going to be treated here but for a few considerations examined also in an interview with the developer: - parameters have been set to define the relevance of a node related to one or two source nodes. The criteria of relevance and the algorithm working depend on technical constraints related to speed in performing the operations and to the dimension of the data to compute; - features and categories of a node are given on an objective base from the database. No human component is added nor influences the results choice; - one of the test that the developers performed with a group of volunteers was asking to judge if the results of the spreading activation were good recommendations to “live the same cinematic experience” of a given film. In papers this aspect was not developed but exploiting the hub as a recommendation system is one of the goal the developers.

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“So, if we do decide that we want to strive for a comparable standard of experience in the products that we are designing, and therefore adopt an appropriate process for doing so, what might that process be?”9

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NOTES 1. [21] Fagnoni R., Puri G., Sabeto C. Design activities.

2. Tamara Munzner Professor Department of Computer Science University of British Columbia IMAGER Graphics, Visualization and HCI group in Keynote on Visualization Principles presented at VIZBI 201 https:// vimeo.com/26205288 3. [24] Friel S.N., Curcio F.R., Bright G.W. Making Sense of Graphs: Critical Factors Influencing Comprehension and Instructional Implications 4. “A cognitive function transforms a task into an activity that is influenced by: a role, a context, the resources to achieve the goal. The resources are physical resources: - human and artifacts and cognitive resources : cognitive abilities” 5. [04] Boy G.A. Cognitive Function Analysis 6. [25] Fry B.J. Computational information design 7. [25] Fry B.J. ibd. “Each step of the process is inextricably linked because of how they affect one another.”

8. Discovery Hub - Semantic spreading activation visualization - http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=NxfVm9O_BI0 9. [07] Buxton B. Sketching User Experiences

Inquiry process 108 Heuristics 104

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Templates 90

Design Fframeworks 86

PROTOTYPE 85 | 118

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design frameworks

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I design frameworks proposti, elemento fondamentale del toolset, sono costituiti dalle 6W. 6 Ws' sono definite le "question words" che in inglese servono per formulare le domande Chi, Cosa, Dove, Quando, Perchè e Come. Formulare queste domande è utile in diversi step del processo progettuale: nella fase di definizione per tracciare profili utente circostanziati e ipotizzare scenari e motivazioni d'uso, nella fase di valutazione del prototipo per comprendere eventuali problemi riscontrati dagli utenti.

Le 6w che hanno una lunghissima storia nella filosofia e nella retorica occidentale e vengono utilizzate in differenti settori, costituiscono la base concettuale dell'approccio tipico delle discipline del design al progetto. A queste domande fondamentali viene aggiunta la domanda "What if...?" letteralmente "Che succede se ... ?" per stimolare la creatività e indagare più ampiamente le possibilità di sviluppo e di utilizzo del prodotto e ipotizzare problematiche o necessità meno evidenti.

STRUMENTI: letteratura scientifica - osservazione diretta - visual thinking

WHAT?

WHO? WHEN?

WHERE?

WHY?

HOW? if ...?

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WHAT IF ...?

The design core element of the frameworks consist in the “Six Ws” integrated by the creative question “what if ... ?”

inquiry approach

The power of asking questions has long tradition since ancient greek and roman culture. From dialectal method of Socrates (maieutics) to the μoρια περισtaτσεως ‘elements of circumstance of Augustines’ rhetors and Cicero the inquiry method has evolved becoming a widely used educational methodology and finally a scientific method for research.

John Dewey american philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer in his book “Logic: The Theory of Inquiry”1 has developed the concept into what is called “experiential learning”. Main part of the methodology is Problem-Based Learning (PBL), a student-centred pedagogical method that relies on active learning and in the personal involvement in constructing knowledge. PBL was expanded from pedagogical, educational method into a scientific research method. Inquiry and PBL were recognized integral features of Science, referred to as “Inquiry-based science”, in fact, featured in the U.S. National Science Educational Standards of 1996.2 The design frameworks key questions are formulated by designers to face every project from a chair design to a book, from a new concept for a train to an exposition project, from packaging redesign to web site development.

In every project, included a paper writing, it is vital to have clear mind of these elements, that should always be kept well visible in front of the developer.

"The time, place, conditions and circumstances within which aspirations are conceived, decisions are made, and productus age takes place have an impact on the levels of satisfaction experienced in the aftermath. Research practice that ignores context is doomed to misunderstanding and misrepresentation."3

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To design an information visualization application the goals to keep in mind are users goals and how to make the application functionalities enhance them. For this reasons, as stated before, the 6Ws are supposed to be useful, in this kind of projects, to trace user- centred, contextualized scenario.

Answering these question will help: better define the issue to face the application strong points, decide the audience and the context of use and most important the purpose of use.

The goals of answering the Six Ws, indeed, are identify the plausible target public and focus on the segment that is considered to be the most likely ideal users and decide to address the application more accurately to them trace user profile including expectations, needed cognitive skills and personal knowledge background identify the users' goals and mental models identify the developer goals for the system identify the intended functionalities fully identify the system potentialities and define how to exploit them to enhance the developers' goals and best meet the users goals conceive different context of use and their relative specific issues identify how the system can enable the user to reach the user goal envision and design the tasks to be performed by the user to achieve the goals considering the user expectations and personal influences plan the best satisfactory activities for the user design the interface design the interaction utilities A most relevant attitude during the entire inquiry process is the “what if … ?” approach. For this reason the question “What if … ?” is the second important element of the frameworks.

This question has to be reformulated several times for each W question to generate new possibilities.

A particular relevance has to be put on the question WHY?

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that defines the goals of the project.

The question “why?” can suggest further details to the other questions and will come out more often during the inquiry process.

This frameworks conceived to be used in the define step of the design process, can, nonetheless, be useful in different steps of the design-thinking process: in the ideation step to identify the needs and motivations of end-users, generating ideas and conceiving use behaviours, in the prototype/testing step to evaluate the application and understand the problems in the refine/choose step to select the powerful ideas, plan the tasks and the application elements As will be shown the frameworks, applied in the prototype/ testing phase, allowed to understand users’ problems and propose the recommendations and the solutions reported that can help fixing the main problems outlined. It also allowed to investigate the application potentialities revealing new possibilities.

You cannot achieve your goals if you don't know what they are.

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NOTES

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1.[16] exerpts from John. Dewey Logic: The Theory of Inquiry 2. http://www.nap.edu 3. [63] Suri J.F., IDEO, Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design

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templates

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In questa sezione si riporta il prototipo dei templates elaborati.

Lo schema mostra in quale step del processo di applicazione dei frameworks i templates possono essere sfruttati. Per migliorarne la fruibilità alcune modifiche sono state pianificate e potranno essere apportate in seguito. Tra le principali modifiche necessarie emerse anche dalla seconda valutazione effettuata si evidenzia che è necessario integrare i templates con istruzioni per la procedura e che può essere utile indicare in ciascun template il momento del processo in corso e gli strumenti utili in quella fase. La dimensione dei template è stata modificata dall'idea originale che voleva queste schede in un formato A5 risultato tuttavia non indicato alla necessità di agilità e funzionalità. Il formato A3, risulta preferibile, per agevolare la collaborazione e l'interazione.

STRUMENTI: letteratura scientifica - osservazione diretta - valutazione - visual thinking

I template riportati nelle pagine seguenti sono stati pensati come supporto al processo collaborativo user-centred di design di una applicazione interattiva di visualizzazione di informazioni. Lo schema in queste pagine fornisce indicazione in quale momento del processo di utilizzo dei frameworks di progetto si ritiene i template possano essere sfruttati.

inquiry process

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user goals

sketch the ontology

draw a use storyboard

user profile

potentialities motivations

trace a scenario

information pyramid

note new ideas

Due tipi di template sono distinti cromaticamente. Il colore arancione è stato scelto per i template che forniscono informazioni all’utente, blu i template che possono essere usati per tracciare schemi e prendere nota di concetti importanti.

L’obiettivo dei tempates è fungere da riferimento e ispirazzione e guidare in maniera semplice la procedura, descritta nella sessione “procedura”, che può essere caotica e dispersiva per la stessa natura dell’iteratività del processo.

Si può prevedere che non tutti i template devono essere usati necessariamente e che possono essere utili alla fine della procedura per mettere a sistema le informazioni raccolte sui post-it.

Da quanto emerso dalla seconda valutazione effettuata sul caso studio perchè i templates possano essere sfruttati anche da un destinatario che non è formato al design thinking è necessario apportare alcune modifiche ai templates: - aggiungere schede con istruzioni relative alla proceura - aggiungere indicazione del momento del processo in corso e gli strumenti utili in quella fase. draw a use storyboard

draw a use storyboard

draw a use storyboard

trace a scenario

trace a scenario

taksonomy tsks/goals

inspiration examples

trace a scenario

taksonomy tsks/goals

user goals

sites for inspiration

interface mockups

note new ideas

information pyramid

note new ideas

heuristics

note new ideas

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heuristics

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Un problema sentito nella comunità scientifica dei progettisti è applicare concretamente raccomandazioni e linee guida che sono diffuse nella letteratura scientifica dei diversi ambiti di pertinenza (l'interfaccia utente, experience design, interazione uomo-computer e la visualizzazione le informazioni). Dal momento che esse possono essere spesso difficilmente classificate e difficili da contestualizzare è stata fatta una selezione di dieci raccomandazioni fondamentali come supporto decisionale allo sviluppatore. Si suppone che il loro uso possa guidare la scelta degli elementi da rappresentare e come debbano essere rappresentati in funzione di una maggiore usabilità della visualizzazione e dell'interazione.

STRUMENTI: letteratura scientifica

A main issue among user experience communities1 is how to actually implement heuristics prioritizing web usability guidelines and best practices2.

A shared agreed concept is that heuristics must be contextualized, and chosen for the specific application.

For this reason a selection of heuristics, result of a literature review of existing heuristics concerning UI, experience design, human-computer interaction and information visualization are given to the developers, in a template as decisional support.

The heuristics here reported have been chosen on the base of the case study as an example of interactive information visualization.

Their use is supposed to support the developer in making the choice of what elements to represent, how to represent them and how to design usability in interaction.

1. KEEP IT SIMPLE, LESS IS MORE 2. IF AN ELEMENT IS NOT STRICTLY NECESSARY OR NOT CONVEYING INFORMATION, AVOID IT Too much information can generate confusion.

Too many elements that convey similar information are not necessary.

Elements conveying different information should be clearly distinguished to avoid confusion.

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3. USE VISUAL CHANNELS TO CONVEY SEMANTIC MEANINGS Every aspect of a visual symbol or image can effectively be exploited to convey a semantic meaning.

4. DRIVE THE USER STRAIGHT TO ITS INTERESTS The user will be set free to explore the application in a second moment. If it has been proved to be effective and simple to achieve an intended goal first the user will interact further.

5. MAKE EXPLICIT THE MEANING OF EACH ELEMENT OF THE INTERFACE 6. MAKE EXPLICIT THE POTENTIALITIES OF THE APPLICATION AT FIRST INTERACTION 7. MAKE SURE TO GENERATE IN THE USER THE CORRECT MENTAL MODEL OF THE APPLICATION 8. ANY INFORMATION SHOULD BE REACHED WITHIN 3 CLICKS 9. BE COHERENT IN THE NAVIGATION POSSIBILITIES Different possibilities of navigation that lead to different contents may be dispersive and a user might risk not to find never some of them.

As the user has been allowed to arrive to a certain content or page should be able to go back.

Connection between two items must be two-way, a item connected to another one should be linked back.

10. ASK YOURSELF WHY? … the user would need your application … the user would need an element of the interface and give what is needed.

The Heuristic n 10 represent the core concept of the design frameworks proposed.3

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NOTES 1. http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&gid=72842&item=1847488 19&type=member&trk=eml-anet_dig-b_pd-ttl-cn&ut=2rx51-fHVwQRw1 http://www.uxsci.com/Survey/ index.php 2. [48] Nielsen J., Loranger H., Prioritizing Web Usability 3. Don’t Ask “What?” Ask “Why?” in this article Tim Brown points out the importance of asking “why?” to bbost creativity http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121206195322-10842349-to-boostcreative-thinking-ask-this-question.

4. David Travis BSc and PhD in Psychology, has worked in the fields of human factors, usability and user experience since 1989 and has published two books on usability “Guidelines, Standards and Style Guides”. In [33] Jacko, J.A. & Sears, A. (eds) The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook. Pages 991-1005. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003. With T. Stewart. http://www.userfocus.co.uk/ resources/guidelines.html

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Guidelines can get you only so far.

Nothing replaces a good design process.4

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In questa sessione è presentato il processo collaborativo dialettico per sfrutare i design frameworks descritti. Il processo è iterativo e nn lineare. Per ciascuna delle domande dei frameworks verrà fornito un sintetico esempio del tipo di informazioni che possono essere raccolte. In particolare viene simulato l'utilizzo della domanda "what if ...?" per avanzare nuove ipotesi di utilizzo, eventuali problematiche nascoste e stimolare ad individuare nuove opportunità e sviluppi dell'applicazione. La domanda fondamentale per individuare gli obiettivi dell'utente è certamente "why?" che sarà riformulata diverse volte nel corso del processo. Le risposte a ciascuna domanda contribuiscono a completare in maniera progressiva anche le informazioni relative ad altre domande e complessivamente a completare uno scenario d'uso dell'applicazione utile come base per il design dell'architettura dell'informazione del sistema.

Idealmente si prevede che il processo di "intervista" sia guidato da un membro del team di sviluppo con un background personale nei settori di ICT e visualizzazione di informazioni e preparato ad un approccio metodologico adeguato al design-thinking.

STRUMENTI: design frameworks

The ideal situation to apply design-thinking to the development of interactive information visualization is a collaborative process. For this reason the design frameworks and the inquiry process would involve an interviewer (ideal would be a visual or interaction designer, or HCI expert with a designthinking orientation and preparation) and the application developer or developers (knowledge engineer or computer scientist).

During the collaborative interview they will exploit the given tools to design the application. In particular the interviewer will lead the interview with an inquiry approach exploiting the given design frameworks to trace a user-centred contextualized scenario.

Answering the questions, given by the interviewer, and filling up the template prepared, the developer will progressively picture the characteristics of users’ profiles in specific contexts of use.

Gradually the answers to the given question will help tracing a more and more detailed scenario.

As already explained a most relevant attitude during the

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entire inquiry process is the “what if … ?” approach. The interviewer will help the developer tracing the scenario suggesting users goals, possible different situations and motivations.

The scenario will help defining the main elements of the system to be chosen and how they have to be organized to match with the identified users goals, the scenario will also be the base upon which to design the system interface and develop the interaction possibility.

The mentioned visual support Template 02 – Visual_tool_ inquiry_method_description will help the interviewer formulating questions.

The following is an example of the inquiry method applied to the Discovery Hub. a) answering the question WHO? To Identify the user allows to formulate a first important distinction and the need to imagine how the users will find and access the application: first access user - how does the user arrive to the Discovery Hub? - what if the user doesn't know anything about the hub? e.g. the user finds the hub as a link (e.g. on facebook, google, etc) - what if the user knows something about it? e.g. has heard about the existence of a discovery tool by chance (e.g. friends, blog …) and has a vague idea of its functionalities - what if has a wrong given mental model? e.g. was given wrong information (e.g. friends explaining the hub is a film recommendation system or is a community of shared interests) - what if has a given preconceived limited mental model? e.g. knows only part of the functionalities (e.g. read that the hub enables finding similar items) - what if has a correct given mental model? e.g. knows about the hub functionalities (e.g. read an article about it, saw a demo presentation ...)

What to show to a first time user to facilitate his/her comprehension of the system and to enhance the satisfaction of

who?

occasional

frequent

regular

becomes a regular? following access

WHAT IF ...

is confident in the potentialities of the hub and accesses it frequently?

What can be shown to retain a regular user, and increase the possibility that will continue using the system daily?

doesn’t know anything about the hub? knows something about it? has a wrong given mental model? has a given preconceived limited mental model? has a correct given mental model?

WHAT IF ...

doesn’t want to register and create a personal profile?

What is the hub?

What goals can it enhance? How should it be used?

WHAT IF ...

What is the hub utility? What is its working core?

What does the user have to know about the hub? What abilities are required to the user?

What are its strong points? What are the weaknesses?

how does the user arrive to the Discovery Hub? first access

features

WHAT IF ...

male? female?

Any difference in the interface? what’s mother tongue? web user? is a regular web user? What if is NOT very confident in the browser functionality? social network user - has a facebook accont – that is used to log him into the system is accustomed to other search engines is a curious person? knows the source topic very well? 110 | 111 doesn’t know the source topic?

What are the “competitors”? Why do other similar systems fail or are successful?

What distinguishes the hub from other utilities? What makes it an innovative resource? system utilities

system potentialities

What is its content?

What are the data? What is their structure? What are the possible categories? Are there subcategories? Are there patterns or repeated elements? What are the data properties? Do they pertain to a specific period?

A specific country?

What are the relations?

Between single items? Among classes?

Between a class and its subclasses? Among subclasses? What typology of relations can the hub show?

Subjective? Like/ don’t like – known/new item – same feedback/opposite feedback?

Objective? Connection – containment – proximity – similarity?

What does the developer wants to show to the users?

hasn’t much time t will use it alone?

will be with friends

- find a specific item, class, subclass?

- see the type of relations?

- to evaluate them?

- to compare them?

- to find a pattern?

- to find frequency?

- to find a preferred relations?

- to find new possible connection?

- to understand the characteristics?

- to see possible influences?

- see the changing in time - to make a prevision?

- to define a tendency?

to explore it?

- to find a turning point?

- find similar items?

s?

- find items with similar characteristics?

- find items in a personalized subclass - create a personal library - learn more about the item itself?

- see materials relative to an item?

- see the most important relations?

WHAT IF ...

Why does the user wants to use the hub?

Where is the user going to use the hub?

Why does the user wants to see this kind of information?

WHAT IF ...

What of this information can the user find in the hub? What does the developer want to show? Which of this goal wants to achieve?

how can the user find this information in the hub data?

How will the user interact with the system?

at home on holidays or free time? n the office for work?

On what support?

How does the system show this information?

How can relational data be represented?

How can a user distinguish the typology of connections?

How can the visualization enhance the outlined user goals?

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the hub use goal (finding interesting correlated items and topics)?

- what if the user doesn't want to register and create a personal profile? following access user - What if the user knows the hub quite well or very well after the first experiences and knows the entire interface tool?

How is it possible to design the system interface to optimize its potentialities?

- What if the user has elaborated a preferred model of use with preferred tools?

- What if the user wants to personalize the navigation? regular user - What if a user becomes a regular?

- What if the user is confident in the potentialities of the hub and accesses it frequently?

- What can be shown to retain a regular user, and increase the possibility that will continue using the system daily?

- What can make the difference in preferring to use it instead of other similar application?

Can be given an adjustable, personalizable profile?

Can be given a personal search history to recall the query and retrace the discovery made?

Can be given personalized recommendations on the base of personal navigation history or on the base of shared interests with other community members? user profile The what if... inquiry approach helps also scanning different possibilities and thus define different typology of users with different needs and goals.

- characteristics of the user: what if is male? What if is female?

Any difference in the interface? Can the interface be neutral or personalized?

What if the results were differentiated?

- personal background and education:

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What if the user is Arabic mother tongue?

- web user What if is a regular web user?

What if is not very confident in the browser functionality?

- social network user: What if the user hasn’t a facebook account to log into the system?

What if the user is accustomed to other search engines?

What if the user is a curious person and wants to explore and discover information?

What if is not curious just want quick specific answers to queries?

- cultural level, knowledge background: What if the knowledge level of preferred items is very deep and the user just needs details or rare information or new relations or recommendations?

What if the knowledge is superficial and the user wants more information and deepen the basic general knowledge? b) answering the question WHAT? It is important to clearly and precisely define the system utilities and potentialities in order to exploit them at best.

What is the hub?

What goals can it enhance? How should it be used?

What is the hub utility? What is its working core?

What does the user have to know about the hub? What abilities are required to the user?

What are its strong points? What are the weaknesses?

What are the “competitors�? Why do other similar systems fail or are successful?

What distinguishes the hub from other utilities? What makes it an innovative resource?

What is its content?

What are the data? What is their structure? What are the possible categories? Are there subcategories? Are there

what?

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patterns or repeated elements? What are the data properties? Do they pertain to a specific period or specific country?

What are the relations?

Between single items?

Among classes?

Between a class and its subclasses?

Among subclasses?

What typology of relations can the hub show?

Are there Subjective relations? (Like/ don't like –

known/new item - same feedback/opposite feedback?)

Are there objective relations? (Connection – containment – proximity – similarity?)

What does the developer wants to show to the users?

where? when?

c) answering the question WHERE? and WHEN? Where is the user going to use the hub?

What if the user uses it at home on holidays or free time?

What if in the office for work?

On what support?

When is the user going to use the hub? What if the user will use it alone? What if will be with friends?

What if the user hasn't much time to explore it?

What if the user uses the hub occasionally? What if uses it on a daily base?

why?

d) answering the question WHY? Why does the user wants to use the hub?

What if the user wants to: - find a specific item, class, subclass?

- see the type of relations?

- to evaluate them?

- to compare them?

- to find a pattern?

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- to find frequency?

- to find a preferred relations?

- to find new possible connection?

- to understand the characteristics?

- to see possible influences?

- see the changing in time - to make a prevision?

- to define a tendency?

- to find a turning point?

- find similar items?

- find items with similar characteristics?

- find items in a personalized subclass - create a personal library - learn more about the item itself?

- see materials relative to an item?

- see the most important relations?

Why does the user wants to see this kind of information?

What of this information can the user find in the hub?

What does the developer want to show? Which of this goal wants to enable? e) answering the question HOW? How can the user find this information in the hub data?

How will the user interact with the system?

How does the system show this information?

How can relational data be represented?

How can a user distinguish the typology of connections?

How can the visualization enhance the outlined user goals?

The process is clearly a nonlinear one. The scenario is, indeed, traced completing progressively each of the six topics corresponding to each question and some answers

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are often brought out by other subsequent.

For example the answer the question WHO? Tracing the user profile grows with the progression of the following answers.

While answering the question WHEN? and WHERE? the developer will go back to complete the WHO? answer and so on. For this reason post-it should be used to exploit the possibility of adding them progressively and moving them where needed. why? to envision users' goals

It is important to point out again that the main question for a user-centred design is “why?�. This question, indeed, refers directly to the user goals. This question will have to be formulated and repeated taking into consideration both the conscious and unconscious goals of the user. To help the developers in this step the given taxonomy can be a valid base as a a reminder of central aspects to take account of and suggesting unconscious goals.

It is impossible to imagine all the possible user goals but certainly some most common or most likely can be defined.

Organizing the information and the system interaction according to this goals will enable the user to understand the application purposes, have a clear mind of its functionalities and thus enable also the achievement of other more complex goals.

Clearly not all the emerged considerations might correspond, first of all, to the developers goal and some answers may not allow an interesting improvement to the system. The choice has to be explicitly made by the developer. The solutions chosen by the developer should be guided by the goal to find the best options that enables the application to merge and satisfy the most relevant and interesting ideas and make sure that the application utilities match users' goals. To this purpose the developer might take into consideration the general heuristics suggested (session heuristics) chosen to be helpful in this step of the process and support decision making. Reviewing the traced scenario and the reflections emerged thanks to the questions the developer will remove the post-it with the ideas that does not need to be taken into consideration or developed further in a first instance, and keep them for further development.

While answering the questions, it might be useful to sketch ideas on papers or white boards for example: - answering the question WHAT? draw the ontology structure evidencing the most relevant elements, using colours to distinguish the typology of elements and of relations;

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- answering the question WHO? WHEN? WHERE? to better enter the mood and the emotional aspects of the possible user can be useful to sketch the context.

The answers from the questions WHEN? and WHERE? can as well help to imagine how (HOW?) the application will be used and the interaction possibilities. (e.g. if a user is sitting at a desk at work it will be more likely to be typing than if lying in bed, if the hub use is supposed to be on holiday the interface might be amusing rather than serious and viceversa etc...); - answering the question WHY? it is advisable to try sketching the user mental model and goals to design the application functionalities that will better suite these elements; - answering the question HOW? is the moment when can be sketched interface mockups and take note of new ideas for a future redesign.

It is important to take note of examples known to check and confront the applications and take inspiration from their strong points and try to improve the weaknesses.

As shown in the schema the templates have been conceived to follow step by step the design process.

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I design frameworks e il toolset elaborati sono stati testati in due fasi su una β-versione dell'applicazione caso studio, Discovery Hub cioè negli step test and re-design del processo di design dell'applicazione, in armonia con le teorie del design-thinking che suggeriscono di lavorare quanto prima su un prototipo del sistema.

Nelle sezioni che seguono verranno presentati in dettaglio le procedure e le modalità con cui sono stati preparati e svolti i test. I risultati del primo step, come verrà spiegato, evidenziano che i framework sono innanzi tutto utili per valutare l'usabilità dell'applicazione e comprendere i problemi riscontrati dall'utente consentendo di definire raccomandazioni per il redesign dell'interfaccia. Inoltre dal secondo step di valutazione emerge che la procedura e il toolset , ancora da perfezionare, costituiscono un supporto efficace per aumentare negli sviluppatori la consapevolezza degli utenti finali e prevedere le loro aspettative e obiettivi, guidando la progettazione user-centred non solo dell'interfaccia e della rappresentazione delle informazioni ma dell'intera architettura dell'applicazione.

STRUMENTI: interviste - osservazione diretta - caso studio - prototipo - test e valutazione - sintesi e analisi ragionata dei risultati - supporti visivi

The frameworks were meant to be validated in three steps.

The first two steps of the evaluation have been performed on the presented case study “Discovery Hub”.

1. The first step was held in the test phase of the development process As said before, the design process is an iterative process with different steps. The first step to apply and validate the frameworks was performed during the “prototype and test” step on a working β-version of the application. This option harmonize with the design-thinking approach that relies on the use of early stages of prototypes to be refined according to users' feedback.

The first step goal was to verify if the frameworks are useful to analyse the application usability and understand possible user problems.

2. The second step consisted in a direct interview with the developers. During this meeting the proposed inquiry process and the templates were exploited in a collaborative session. The goal was to state if the toolset is useful to better understand the application usability problems and to help planning the redesign.

In this step were followed the conceived approach to apply the frameworks and to use the templates. The goal to achieve, in this case, was to state to what extent the developers had taken into consideration the end-users. The

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hypothesis to verify was that the toolset can boost user and context awarness, enhancing user-centred development vital for the re-desgin of the application.

The second step of the evaluation was useful to verify the process effectiveness and to highlight strong and weak points of the toolset to refine the prototype In the following sections will be presented in details the preparation and the results of the two steps.

3. A third step, is the projection of a future work. It would involve testing the entire toolset, refined after the second step results, with other developers of similar applications.

The third step could be applied in two different step of the development process: in the prototype and test phase of a working prototype and in earlier stages (define and research) of the design process.

1st step perfomed

2nd step perfomed

3rd step further works

goal: evaluate the design frameworks step: prototype and test redesign learn procedure: individual application of the

design frameworks

goal: evaluate the design frameworks

evaluate and optimize the toolset step: prototype and test redesign learn procedure: collaborative sessions

goal: evaluate the toolset in different step

of the design process on different applications step: define research ideate procedure: collaborative sessions

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Il primo step di valutazione per verificare l'efficacia dei frameworks è stato svolto per valutare Discovery Hub dal punto di vista dell'utente. Sono stati scelti cinque volontari, con differenti modelli mentali dell'applicazione cui sono stati proposti due scenari ciascuno con due obiettivi da raggiungere. In questa sezione viene descritta la procedura del test e i risultati ottenuti. L'analisi dei risultati ha consentito di rilevare la validità della rappresentazione delle informazioni visualizzate e analizzare le difficoltà e le esigenze degli utenti nella comprensione delle connessioni tra i dati e gli elementi dell'interfaccia utili nel prendere una decisione e formare una opinione. Alla luce du queste considerazioni è stato possibile formulare delle raccomandazioni e tracciare dei mockups per il redesign dell'applicazione allo scopo di migliorarne l'usabilità e sfruttarne appieno le potenzialità.

STRUMENTI: osservazione diretta - caso studio - prototipo - test e valutazione - sintesi e analisi ragionata dei risultati - supporti visivi

Preliminary considerations using the frameworks to evaluate an application

The first step to evaluate the frameworks consisted in testing the Discovery Hub on five volunteers.

The test (reported in session “evaluation 1st step - test and questionnaire”) was prepared and refined with the collaboration of the tutor, Mr Giboin, and afterwards conducted on five users.

test preparation

A first trial session was held on Mr Giboin. Applying the frameworks to trace the user profile (answering the question who?) we defined that he had already, partially, used the application before and knew the application functionality.

This lead to outline the importance of taking into account the product use life cycle, and define a first distinction between first time users and following access users distinguished in: “occasional”, “frequent” and “regulars”. This distinction, as will be explained in the recommendations section, is most important to correctly design the interaction.

Another consideration was made: Mr Giboin was aware of the intended purposes of the hub, had a correct Mental Model1 of the application. We realized that other users, including the test volunteers, might have had a similar or a different previous knowledge of the Hub or, oppositely, might have never heard of it before.

selection of the volunteers

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We decided that it could be interesting to verify if a different starting point in the application knowledge would imply different responses and different behaviours. For this reason the five volunteers, all first time users, were chosen with different preconceived Mental Models and knowledge of the

application. Their knowledge was verified in the short interview at the beginning of the test.

The purpose of this choice was to define: •

if the user Mental Model of the system functionalities and application purposes matches the developer Mental Model (MM) and the system utilities

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if the system functionalities correspond to the developer model/goal, if the description of the application given by the developer corresponds to the interface functionalities.

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how users’ mental models influence the achievement of the application goals

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if the user Mental Model changes during the three phases of the interaction experience with the application: 1. before entering the system 2. during the interaction 3. at the end of the interaction For the redesign purpose it was useful to understand if the Mental Model changes what elements of the interface has been helpful or misleading.

Five Mental Models of first time users have been outlined as follows and the volunteers were selected in order to have an example each: No Mental Model – user n. 4 Wrong Mental Model – user n. 3 Fuzzy Mental Model – user n. 1 Limited Mental Model – user n. 5 Correct Mental Model – user n. 2 It's important to notice that this distinction reflects a plausible range of the real possibility of user knowledge of the application at the first time access. As will be explained in the results analysis section, distinguishing this five type of user and relative MM was useful not only to analyse the problems that emerged in achieving the application comprehension goal, but also to compare and analyse the results of other, following goals. The problems that emerged during the test were, firstly, formulated and described as reported by the users or detected by the tester during the evaluation phase.

User Mental Model

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In a second moment the problems have been brought back to the described typology of possible problems and analysed also from the system side, according to the taxonomy presented in section “method and materials” to understand on what part of the system features and functionality they depend.

Test goals As seen in the section “ method and materials “ the Discovery hub functionalities are based on real time linked data and semantic connections. Its purpose of use is to assist the user in exploratory search, to enhance the discovery and find recommendations about new interesting items and topics starting from a fuzzy query, or a referential item.

On the base of this developer statement, the first aim of the test, was to evaluate the user comprehension of the application scope and detect and identify the problems, encountered by the user, in understanding the system utilities, and to verify the effectiveness of the interface in communicating the system goals.

As it is, the hub is designed to enhance the user goal defined by the author as “what can I discover starting from a searched topic? What elements are connected?”. The goal of the user is supposed to be “satisfy a curiosity”2 assuming that this kind of mental process is peculiar of the human cognitive process, and discover related items and new information.

The test, for this reasons was also focused on evaluating the validity of the results representation and organization and the connection visualization.

The visualization of the relations among the results in fact is a main topic of the hub, for this reason the test aimed at verifying the effectiveness of the visualization of relational data3 and the organization of the conveyed information.

Another important aim of the test was to detect the user cognitive, unconscious goals in performing each task in the process of achieving a conscious goal.

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Results Minor problems Minor problems of the Discovery Hub, as emerged from the test, are here considered those problems, not related to cognitive functions but mainly to perceptual problems and dependent only on a non-optimal design of the visual interface and of the interaction. This kind of problems are most likely to be difficult to be prevented in the first design phase without a working prototype.

Even if they interfere with the interaction, complicating the accomplishment of a task and thus might trouble the smoothness of the navigation to the point of pushing the user to abandon the application, they do not directly prevent the achievement of a goal, and do not need a global redesign of the application to be fixed.

Minor problems are less interesting for the present research purposes, for this reason they will not be examined in depth here. Nonetheless, it can be useful to check out also this kind of problems found before releasing a new version, especially because often this problems exacerbate the main ones. Thus to help preventing similar issues, they are reported in Appendix A Main problems Main problems seems, instead, to originate from cognitive problems and emotional biases. The test, in fact, demonstrates that main usability problems depends on missed goals either conscious or unconscious, that correspond to the user's needs and expectations.

As shown in fig. “Main problems� four main cognitive problems emerged.

Most severe problems, detected by the users can, indeed, be lead back to them.

In the following pages the problems will be described from the user point of view and will be related to the conscious and unconscious goals.

developer

MAIN PROBLEMS

1 2 3 4 126 | 127

THE SYSTEM GOALS DO NOT FIND THE USERS UNCONSCIOUS GOALS THE SYSTEM DOESN’T ALLOW THE INTENDED GOAL OF THE DEVELOPER

THE SYSTEM GOALS AND THE USER GOALS DO NOT MATCH

THE SYSTEM POTENTIALITIES ARE NOT EXPLOITED

goal

U goal

U goal

U goal

U goal

potentialities

potentialities

goal

U goal U goal

user

SYSTEM potentialities

goal

U goal

goal

SYSTEM

goal

S

goal

EM

Main problems

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PROBLEM 1. THE SYSTEM DOESN’T ALLOW THE DEVELOPER INTENDED GOAL conscious goal

Give recommendations from a source item

unconscious goal

Communicate the system criteria for the results selection, meet personal criteria of similarity in the items displayed as results of a query.

problem

The user look for recommendation of similar items from a subjective point of view but the system doesn’t include human factors of evaluations like emotion, atmosphere, memories etc.

The user has personal criteria and the system criteria are not relevant enough to allow the user assume them. The goal cannot be achieved because the criteria of the hub and the users criteria don’t match. (img. HUB 20/21)

screenshot

HUB 20

HUB 21

PROBLEM 2. THE SYSTEM GOALS AND THE USERS GOALS DON’T MATCH conscious goal

Find a recommendation from a liked item

unconscious goal

Understand the system criteria for the results selection, meet personal criteria for similarity in the items displayed as results of a query

problem

This problem is generated by a wrong mental model, that in particular was given to the user by the developer and refers to the problem mentioned above. (img. HUB 20/21/22)

screenshot

HUB 22

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conscious goal

Search for information on the World Wide Web.

unconscious goal

Learn more about the source item, find links and informations

problem

The user wants to use the system as a search engine expecting to find a list of web pages, images, information and other types of files. (img. HUB 24) The user with a fuzzy MM and the user who had not a correct cognition of the hub purposes and functionalities were mislead by some elements of the interface, that made them think that the hub is a search engine. (img. HUB 25) The user thus could not understand why the mosaic was displayed and the results didn’t contain direct, easily detectable informations about the source item. (img. HUB 23)

screenshot

HUB 23

HUB 25

HUB 24

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PROBLEM 3. SYSTEM GOALS DON’T FIND USERS’ UNCONSCIOUS GOALS conscious goal

Get to know and understand the application functionalities

unconscious goal

First access users need to form a correct mental model of the application

problem

First access users, who had either a wrong or a fuzzy mental model couldn’t understand the system functionality. The purposes of the hub are not immediately self evident.

The introductory explanatory text of the login page is not effective to enable this goal. (img. HUB 01) All of the users tested has jumped over it without reading, considering it a common disclaimer, that are most of the time instinctively avoided.

screenshot

HUB 01

conscious goal

Find a specific item

unconscious goal

Understand the system organization of the results display, organize the results into a mental map, divide the results into categories or subsets

problem

The user cannot easily find explanations about how the displayed results are organized. (Img Hub 02) The results page displayed after a query is a mosaic where the elements are perceived as:

- not organized (Img Hub 03)

- not the most important

- not the most directly or closely connected

- not the results with most elements in common

The user needs to organize the results and refine the search.

In the detailed list, where filters are offered, this possibility is not detected. The filter buttons on top of the page are not detected by the user. This reveals to be a useful utility after the user is informed of it.

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The category on the right of the mosaic and on the top of the list are not detected, users don’t interact with the category menu. (Img Hub 04) In the list visualization the results are numbered suggesting a hierarchy of contents. The users, though, detected that the ranking is not coherent to any understandable criteria. Items with more connection elements often are on the bottom of the page and items with a valued less relevant kind of connection, for example “Living people”, appear on top. (Img Hub 05/06)

screenshot

HUB 02

HUB 03

HUB 04

HUB 05

HUB 06

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Make a decision (decide wether would like or not an item)

unconscious goal

Understand the links among items, meet personal evaluation criteria

problem

The users couldn’t understand the results and formulate an opinion to satisfy their conscious goal.

The features of an item are communicated mainly by the icon image, the summary text gives too much informations and it’s difficult to select the main.

The hierarchy of the elements displayed is not clear and the elements in common are not visible immediately. This requires that the user performs many task, keeping information in mind and loosing the important visual support.

Common elements are not visible at first and the user must look for them.

Furthermore it is not possible to compare the items and make a hierarchy, it is not easy to understand the filtering method that is constrained to options that often don’t meet the users criteria.

The user interaction possibilities with the results are limited.

(Img Hub 07/08/09)

screenshot

HUB 07

HUB 09

132 | 133

HUB 08

PROBLEM 4. THE SYSTEM POTENTIALITIES ARE NOT FULLY EXPLOITED conscious goal

Learn new information

unconscious goal

See the nature of the relation, understand immediately the elements of connections

problem

The interaction with the system is not quick and responsive enough, the users don’t dig into details of items that stimulated their curiosity but did not correspond to their main interest, because it requires a time taking process and too many steps to get to new informations.

For example users found among the results some unexpected ones, that stimulate their curiosity but are not exactly the kind of items they’re interested into.

The users would be curious to discover why the two items are connected or they might like to know more about them, but they will not perform the complex set of tasks required to get the informations unless the item is considered really important. (Img Hub 10/11/12)

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HUB 10

HUB 12

HUB 11

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Enlarge personal knowledge

unconscious goal

To allow knowledge building it is necessary for humans to create mental maps of the topic of interest

problem

The results are not represented in cognitive comprehensible structure, the ontology behind the results is not detectable.

When a complex query is performed, for example two or more elements together, no element of the interface is communicating that the results displayed refers to the items in common to the two searched ones. (Img Hub 13/14) The users would be curious to discover why the two items are connected or they might like to know more about them, but they will not perform a complex set of tasks required to get the informations unless the item is considered really important. (Img Hub 10/11/12)

screenshot

HUB 13

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HUB 14

conscious goal

Find new interesting items starting from an unknown one

unconscious goal

Create a mental model of an unknown item and evaluate it, understand the connected items and evaluate them

problem

The system doesn’t give immediately enough information to help the user formulate an idea of the item itself. Thus, being difficult to understand and evaluate the source item it’s more difficult to evaluate the connections. The user will try to get more information about it relying on a traditional search engine or using Wikipedia.

(Img Hub 15/16/17/18/19)

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HUB 15

HUB 16

HUB 17

HUB 18

HUB 19

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SCENARIO 01

THE USER

KNOWS WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN THE RESULTS

displayed results match the expectation understands the results motivation results criteria are explicit recognizeble result organization clear result organization right result organization share the result organization

136 | 137

displayed results don’t match the expectation cannot understand the results motivation results criteria are not explicit no result organization not clear result organization wrong result organization mismatching result organization

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SCENARIO 02

THE USER

DOES NOT KNOW WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN THE RESULTS

EVALUATE AND FORMULATE A PERSONAL IDEA OF THE UNKNOWN ITEM

the user understands the caracteristics of the searched items understands the results motivation results criteria are explicit recognizable result organization clear result organization right result organization share the result organization

the user cannot understand the caracteristics of the searched items cannot understand the results motivation results criteria are not explicit no result organization not clear result organization wrong result organization mismatching result organization

Yes

NO

Yes

Yes

User 02

User 03

User 04

User 05

User 06

NO

A C HIE VE D VE R YE AS Y

User 01

EA SY

x

x

x

x

x

a tool for indirect information discovery

Results mixed up without organization

graph

mosaic visualization top results

A film recommendation Wrong system pre-conceived MM recommendation system

the results don't match pictures of films in the the expectancies mosaic Tagline

no pre-conceived MM

Correct pre-conceived MM

Categories

a tool for information discovery

doesn't understand the mosaic visualization results top results

heard about it As a recommendation system

detailed list visualization

a search engine

expected different results

MI IN SLE EL TER ADIN E ME FAC G NT E S

search field Tagline

HU B

detailed list visualization Categories

D I F FIC UL T VE RY D I F FIC UL US T EL EFU EM L EN INT T S ERF AC E

GOAL 01 | Understand the hub purposes NIT IVE P R OB LE M CO G

M US IS ER ‌ M

N HU BK

–T HE

DG E OW LE

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User 03

User 04

User 05

User 06

NOT like like

NOT like like

NOT like like

NOT like like

VE D

AC HIE

yes

NI

yes

Yes x

Yes

VE RY E

AS Y

x

x

EA SY

x x

x

x

x

x

Graph

Page 2

Genre Plot Director

Descriptions

x Filters

Feeling emotions Plot Atmosphere

Pictures Common elements Graph

Genre Plot

Actors Genre

Common Elements Pictures Tags Categories Description Pictures

Genre Actors Year

Tags Pictures Common elements

the user whose criteria for chosing a film in the first scenario were more subjective, Feelings, Emotions, Atmosphere could not fulfill the goal and was expecting different results but not having a preconceived mental model of the hub as a recommendation system could enjoy finding other interesting information.

User 02

NOT like like

NOT like

User 01

like

DI F F ICU LT VE RY D I F FIC UL US T EL EFU EM L EN INT T S ERF AC E

GOAL 02 | Find an item starting from a known one

RE C SU R ITE LTS RIA EV A

L U AT IO N

scenario 01

The results don't satisfy the mental criteria Good relations are expected Hard to understand the nature of relations

The results don't match the expectation No organization / no meaningful hierarchy No relevant relations among some items

Mismatched criteria No organization / no meaningful hierarchy Too much and missing information

Semantic mapping missing Don't understand the results given Don't understand the relations

Missing explanation No cathegorization Don't understand the relations

CO G

NIT IVE P RO BL EM

User 03

User 04

User 05

User 06

NOT like like

NOT like like

NOT like like

NOT like like

NOT like

User 02

User 01

like

NOT like

like

VE D

AC HIE

Yes

Yes

NO

½

½

VE RY E

x

x

x

x

EA SY

AS Y

GOAL 03 | Find an item starting from an unknown one

x

x

x

Common Elements

Descriptions Filters Graph

Pictures Common elements Graph

Pictures

x Description

Categories

Tags

x Pictures

Country Plot

Genre Country

Genre Country

Country

Common elements

RE CR SUL ITE TS RIA EV A L UA TIO N

Genre Country Plot

x Pictures

Tags

DI F F ICU LT VE RY DI F F ICU U LT S EL EFU EM L E IN N TS TER FA CE

scenario 02 NIT IVE P RO BL EM

Not easy to understand the relations

No organization / no meaningful hierarchy

No organization / no meaningful hierarchy Too much information

Semantic mapping missing Don't understand the results given Don't understand the relations

Missing explanation No cathegorization Don't understand the relations

CO G

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User 05

User 06

NOT like like

NOT like like

NOT like

User 04

NOT like like

like

User 03

User 02

NOT like like

NOT like

User 01

like

Yes

Yes

x

x

A C HIE VE D V E RY EA SY

Yes

x

x x

x

x

x

x

Graph

x Description

Tags

Common elements Graph

Categories Tags Description

Common Elements Tags

Tags Common elements Graph

D I F FIC UL T VE RY D IFF ICU US LT EL EFU EM L I E NT NTE S RF AC E

EA SY

NOT like

NOT like like

NOT like like

NOT like like

NOT like like

NOT like like

like

evaluate results

User 06

User 05

User 04

User 03

User 02

User 01

GOAL 05 | Evaluate the results dispalyed

x

VE D AC HIE

GOAL 04 | Understand the connection between items displayed

VE RY E

AS Y EA SY

connections

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x x

VE RY

UL T DIF FIC

LT DIF FIC U

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Information

User 01

x

User 02

x

User 03

no

ye s

GOAL 06 | Learn significant information

x

User 04

x

User 05

x

User 06

It's interesting noticing that the user who had a wrong MM of the application considering the Hub a Movie recommendation system could not discover any interesting information.

Being too focused on a specific goal the user was not open in digging into information, the curiosity was not stimulated and the frustration of not being able to achieve the goal was preventing the possibility of a wider exploration

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User 06 US EF UL US US E IT E I AG TA A GA IN / I N NO

US EL ES S/

HA CH RD NIC ALL – E – EN EA GIN SY G / DI FR FFIC IEN UL DL T / Y US ER

NO VE T IN RY TE I N RE TE ST RE I N ST G / ING BO INV RIN OL G / VIN G

T

GOAL 07 | Enjoy a nice digital experience

User 01 3 3 3 4 3 1

User 02 4 3 2 2 4 2

User 03 5 2 2 4 2 1

User 04 5 5 3 4 5 5

User 05 4 4 3 3 3 3

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Results analysis For the test results analysis were prepared two visualizations (Results Analysis 01, Results Analysis 02) that helped pointing the following interesting remarks: About the mosaic

The scenarios were designed to evaluate the representation of the information displayed and the user difficulties and needs in understanding the nature of the connections and be supported in making a decision. Between the two visualization options “Mosaic” and “Detailed list” there is a big difference in efficacy. The Mosaic was useful in the first scenario only for the user who had a correct preconceived mental model. This user knew why the results were displayed and what to look for. The users with no mental model and with a limited one, who could understand the application potentialities after performing a few tasks, considered the mosaic representation partially useful.

Other users could not understand the mosaic representation.

For none of the users the mosaic visualization was helpful in the second scenario where there were less pictures available and the topic was not known. All of the users preferred the detailed list visualization. This visualization though had to be suggested since, the two possibilities of results visualization had to be explained to all the five users.

Three useful tools

The users were asked to evidence three tools that helped them fulfil the given goal. The request of spotting three useful elements was motivated by the “three-click rule”, commonly shared among UX designers, according by which “If users can't find what they're looking for within three clicks, they're likely to get frustrated and leave the site.”4 From the results analysis it is evident that pictures have a strong communicative power, being able to give more information at once (e.g. the poster of a film will tell the title, often the main actors, can suggest the genre and give an idea of the period without need of the year etc). Some other tools like “Wikipedia”, for instance, had been useful but could not be included in the top three selection.

The graph emerge to be the second most useful tool confirming the power of visual explanations.

An important remark is needed here: the tools “Common elements”, “Wikipedia” and “Graph” were not spontaneously found by the users and had to be suggested to all of them except for the user with the correct mental model who exploited them spontaneously.

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Other problems detected by the users refers to perceptual and emotional aspects. In fact subjective criteria in evaluating a recommendation are not available in the application.

The users whose criteria for choosing a film in the first scenario were more subjective, Feelings, Emotions, Atmosphere (see appendix C) could not fulfil the goal (Cognitive bias3).

Human factors

This user was expecting different results and was not satisfied by the suggested similar results, nonetheless, not having a preconceived mental model of the hub as a recommendation system, could enjoy finding other interesting information.

Furthermore, for this user, it was easier to achieve the goals of the second scenario because had no emotional criteria to fulfil. This user, who had strong personal criteria, was also the one who had less problems finding “don't like� items.

Items that might not find the personal interests were harder to find for other users because they could not compare the elements and make a clear idea of the item.

This was especially true in the second scenario where the elements were unknown. In this case instead the user who had less strict personal criteria of choice, not having expectations or emotional restrictions, could fulfil the goals more easily, being driven by curiosity and open mind. We can argue that having a specific goal, like identify an item as a recommendation, is not the main utility of the hub that is instead better used as an information discovery tool.

GOAL 06 | Learn significant information

Results Analysis 01

knows the hub

knows the hub

correct pre-conceived MM

correct pre-conceived MM

limited pre-conceived MM

limited pre-conceived MM

wrong pre-conceived MM

wrong pre-conceived MM

heard about it

heard about it

no pre-conceived MM

no pre-conceived MM

YES

NO

3

INTEREST

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Results Analysis 02

very easy easy difficult very difficult

ACHIEVE A GIVEN GOAL scenario 01 _ find 2 like items

knows the hub correct pre-conceived MM limited pre-conceived MM wrong pre-conceived MM heard about it no pre-conceived MM common elements

pictures

graph

filters

tags

description

wikipoedia

mosaic

detailed list

ACHIEVE A GIVEN GOAL scenario 01 _ find 2 NOT like items knows the hub correct pre-conceived MM limited pre-conceived MM wrong pre-conceived MM heard about it no pre-conceived MM common elements

pictures

graph

filters detailed list

146 | 147

tags

description

wikipedia

mosaic pictures visualization

ACHIEVEAAGIVEN GIVENGOAL GOALscenario scenario02 02__find find22like likeitems items ACHIEVE knows the hub correct pre-conceived MM limited pre-conceived MM wrong pre-conceived MM heard about it no pre-conceived MM common elements

pictures

graph

filters

tags

description

wikipoedia

mosaic

detailed list

ACHIEVE A GIVEN GOAL scenario 02 _ find 2 NOT like items

knows the hub correct pre-conceived MM limited pre-conceived MM wrong pre-conceived MM heard about it no pre-conceived MM common elements

pictures

graph

filters detailed list

tags

description

wikipedia

mosaic pictures visualization

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Developer Mental Model

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The test results analysis helped, thus, to outline a mismatching between the developer MM and the system utilities. In fact after the test session a question emerged: does the system functionalities correspond to the developer MM and to the application intended goals?

Does the description and the explanation, given by the developer, correspond to the interface functionalities and potentialities? If not is it possible to correct the application to achieve the prefigured goal? How to?

The wrong mental model was given to the user tested by a direct presentation of the application by the developers.

The hub is a tool that enables to discover relations, find items connected to a searched one and thus discover interesting and unexpected information.

It is necessary to take into consideration three important aspects: 1. the habit of use of commonly known internet applications 2. the context of use (too many information not enough time ) 3. the user motivation, that moves the curiosity.

This kind of utility is quite new among web applications; users are accustomed to common search engines and to recommendation systems. Both this applications work in a different way and display information in a different way.

A recommendation system cannot prescind from a judgeDiscovery hub recommendation system ment that involves also emotional aspects. Effective recommendations can be made only by humans (see img Recommendation system vs discovery engine). Missing to take into consideration this aspect the hub, as it is, cannot be effective especially if compared to other recommendation tool.

First of all, it must be considered that users are used to think (Mental Model) about recommendations in a sense of "similarity" between same kind of items: for example from a mentioned film, song, painting, photographer and we expect suggestions of other films, songs, paintings, photographers that might like.

Another big difference from traditional recommendation system is in the way the information are provided.

Traditional recommendation system says: “You like this … you might also like this …” “people who liked this … also

148 | 149

liked this …” The hub enlarges this concept of recommendation but the users are not "used" to it because they normally consult recommendation systems "localized" and focused on the topic. The hub should communicate this great potentiality and show a new way of discovering items and building knowledge from semantic connections.

Discovery hub says: "you might want to know that ... ", "you might be interesting as well in ... ", “this item is connected to that one for this reason …” The kind of recommendation the hub gives is similar to the kind of information that can be found on a tourist guide, with the great advantage that the source item can be whatever and not only a geographical place or as another human being might behave with the great advantage of the number of suggestions and the accuracy of the connection but without the personal judgment.

For example: if somebody says that loves Nordic countries than I will say "oh yes! Do you know the Hurtigruten? Have you ever seen the northern lights? Have you ever been to Iceland? You should listen to the Sigur Ros! And watch "Ondine" the film with Colin Farrell, who also played in "In bruges". Would you like to visit Norway? If you are planning to go there you should really try the sledge dogs and find a bungalow to sleep in this traditional place http://www. engholm.no in the middle of Lapland, near the winter camp of Sami. The owner is Sven Engholm, eleven time winner of Europe's longest sled dog race. It is also recommended that you taste the typical Gjetost Cheese there!” The semantic ontology (img. Ontology example) behind this example allows to find a big range of information in different fields, from the smallest details to the bigger picture starting from any of the mentioned element, let's say for example the traditional cheese.

The scenario of the test intentionally did not include the possibility of finding a different typology of information to evaluate the spontaneous possibility of making discoveries.

The users tested were too concentrated in fulfilling the given task, using the Hub as a recommendation tool, that the possibility of other discovery was perceived as a distraction.

Despite the fact that this can be a limit for the hub potentiality evaluation, it was interesting to see that users were making unexpected discovery, even if they were not feeling free to dig further into the details without the tester encouragement Another big problem for the discovery hub as a recommendation system sits right on the mentioned “that we might like” and “other people liked”.

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A system can give information, can show common elements, can compare and associate items according to one or more of the different aspects that compose the complexity of an item. The kind of similarity a technological system can detect and suggest is based only on shared elements, but cannot comprehend human evaluating criteria set by human factors.

For example a system might consider “similar� two films with same actors. The cast is the same, so from that point of view they are similar, two comedies are similar because they are supposed to cheer up the public, two french music artists are similar because they are french and they are music artists. Thus from an objective point of view ZAZ and Serge Gaisbourg are strongly linked to each other. Nonetheless from a subjective point of view only human factors can decide if I will like ZAZ since I like Serge Gaisbourg. Human factors comprehend of course non measurable values like emotions, feelings, atmosphere, memories, taste.

To allow the Hub to be a recommendation system, as the developers wish to, a few changes have to be made and they will be described in the recommendation session.

Discovery hub search engine

If the user will use the hub as an alternative, for instance, to Google or other search engines, that means to understand what an item is and learn more information about it, or find links on the web, will probably be disappointed. Google and other common search engines give links to exhaustive information about the item itself. The results displayed will give enough information to identify it and will also provide the most relevant sites relative to where the item can be found, helping the user compose a satisfying knowledge and a good understanding of the searched item.

The Discovery Hub, instead, provides very short explanation, a limited number of links and generally doesn't include the direct link to the main site of the item. If a user needs to learn more information about an item will probably get more satisfaction performing a query on a traditional search engine The powerful, innovative aspect of the Discovery Hub, instead, is in showing a net of connections that standard search applications don't show. Discovery engines like discovery hub might allow an innovative and interesting use of online information. Nonetheless it is necessary to attend the user through the system functionalities to create a new

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Recommendation system vs discovery engine

mental model, different from the one of search engine usage.

It is vital that it shows new possibilities, and the advantages of semantic construction of information connections.

Sottsass said “When Charles Eames designed his chair, he was not designing a chair, but a way of sitting; that is to say he was not designing for a function, but designing a function.” This consideration can be applied to any project also to digital applications. To develop the Discovery Hub is not designing an application for a function, it is designing a new function.

The user needs to become confident in the potentialities of the application, and learn to appreciate the possibility of this kind of utility, especially considering the common case of users, non confident with the ontology concept and semantic research, who might have more problems understanding this functionality. This reconfirms how important it is that the users have the correct mental model of the application and seeking to achieve a “pertinent” goal. As demonstrated in the example above this difference can be made simply in the way the results are proposed. If the users think that are consulting a recommendation system and expect to be proposed results relevant as a recommendations many of

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the displayed results could be disappointing.

It would be necessary to figure out what the users were looking for, to understand what their evaluating criteria might be. Who is the user? Why is the user using the application?

So why is the user curios to discover more information about an item? Does the user want to find similar items? Is the user an expert of that topic? (For example: what if a user is looking for french rock bands starting from a known one (e.g. Zaz)?

What if a user is looking for famous artistic couples, what if a user wants to know more about french music? What if a user is a big fan of Serge Gainsbourg and wants to know more about him? Can be argued that these options emerged applying the design frameworks.

Clearly it is impossible to imagine all the possible combinations. For this reason the results must be proposed as they really are: a range of interconnected items relevant to learn new information or to discover something new and not as recommendations. A system cannot evaluate and make the kind of decisions the users do. A system though can make this decision easier showing the relations, showing the essential information, organizing the results to enhance a mental map of the connections, suggesting a hierarchy always making explicit the criteria5 to let the users see, understand and agree with them.

System potentialities After detecting this mismatch I applied the frameworks to perform an evaluation of the application and understand the system potentialities and how they could be exploited.

I questioned myself what were the data telling me, what advantage could they bring to me, why should I use the Hub? Thus it was possible to define three main potentialities of the hub: 1. find interesting items related to a source one 2. discover new information about an item. A different kind of information on respect to what can be learnt thanks to a traditional search engine 3. discover random topics Each of this potentiality can be enhanced through specific interface tools as will be described in the recommendation part.

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User Mental Models The user who had a fuzzy mental model (test n.1) of the application formulated a wrong mental model (“it's a search engine”) interacting with it because of some elements of the interface (the search field). The wrong mental model induced the user to try to fulfil goals that are not pertinent to the application and thus conclude that it doesn't work. (Img Hub 20/32) The users who had a preconceived wrong MM (user n. 3) of the application (“a film recommendation system”) was the only one who could not benefit of the application functionalities and could not learn any new interesting information. This user was also the one who had more problems in achieving the given goals and the one who reported the worse result in the whole digital experience.

The users who had a preconceived wrong MM and the user who had a preconceived fuzzy Mental Model and formed a wrong one while interacting with the system (“the Discovery Hub is a search engine”) stated that, as it is they would not chose to use the Hub again. Every user tested, though, declared that if the main results organization problems will be sorted out they would be interested in using it further.

The user with no preconceived mental model could partially understand the hub purposes (”a tool for indirect information discovery”) but only thanks to the list visualization and in particular the most helpful tool was the “graph”.

The mosaic visualization, instead, was not clear and misleading because the results, in particular the “top”, were perceived as “mixed up without organization”. It's important to remark that the same user was not able to accomplish the given goal of finding a specific item as required by the scenario and considered the request of the tester “wrong” in respect of the application functionalities, that don't correspond to those of a recommendation system.

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Knows about the hub functionalities (read an article about it, saw a demo presentation, etc). Example of this case is the user n 2 tested.

What to show to a first time user to facilitate the system comprehension and to enhance the satisfaction of the hub use goal ? (finding interesting correlated items and topics) Like the user with wrong Mental Model, the user whose Mental Model corresponds to the system utility will visually explore the interface of the application and will interact with it seeking for confirmation of his model.

The intended user goal will correspond to the system goals.

If pertinent goals are not achieved it is necessary to understand what element of the interface was misleading or not working properly, but most important it is vital that the user does not change the mental model that has to be confirmed by the interface and by the interaction results.

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The user doesn't know anything about the hub, for example finds the hub by chance navigating on internet (a link on facebook, google, etc). Example of this case is the user n 4 tested.

If the user doesn't know anything about the application, will need to find explanation from the system, thus will visually explore the interface looking for information to understand its utility and its working. The very name of the application is certainly the first element conveying the information about its utilities, hence the importance of representative and catchy name and tagline. This elements, though, are not enough or could be misinterpreted, if the system goals are not clearly represented in the landing page, and the user might not understand the purpose of use. Misleading or not clear elements might induce a wrong Mental Model (analysed further on).

In the No MM case it is probably easier to lead back the user to the right Mental Model counting on task results, that are able to be representative of the application functionality. In fact the first actions will be driven by the goal to understand the application. If the application will give a correct explanation of the functionalities and a clear model of use the user will be able to perform a task to achieve a pertinent goal. If a pertinent goal is not achieved it is necessary to understand what element of the interface prevented a successful action.

Furthermore the user without a preconceived Mental Model is also open to achieve goals not pursued but enabled by the application.

No Mental Model

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Fuzzy Mental Model

The user knows something about the application, has heard about the existence of a discovery tool by chance (eg friends, blog, etc ) and has a vague idea of its functionalities. Example of this case is the user n.1 tested.

Limited Mental Model

The user has a given preconceived limited Mental Model.

Knows only part of the functionalities (eg read that the hub enables finding similar items) Example of this case is the user n.5 tested.

In both this cases, as for the No Mental Model, the first interaction with the application should communicate the potentialities of the application and enhance clearly to achieve all the goals enabled.

Misleading or not clear elements might induce a wrong Mental Model (analysed further on).

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The user has a wrong given Mental Model was given wrong information (eg friends explaining the hub is a film recommendation system or is a community of shared interests).

Example of this case is the user n 3 tested.

The user who has received incorrect explanations about the application functionality will unconsciously visually explore the interface of the application and will interact with it seeking for confirmation of his model.

Equivocal elements of the interface will be interpreted as functions of the MM. The interaction will be focused on achieving that goal corresponding to the MM. The goals driving the user actions will be pertinent to the Mental Model which, being wrong, will lead to an unsuccessful ending.

The user with a deep rooted wrong Mental Model, set free to interact with the application is more likely to abandon the application due to frustration and disappointment because will most likely be unable to appreciate other possible uses and goals of the application unless the interface it will provide a new clear, univocal correct Mental Model.

Among the volunteer tested, the user who had a preconceived wrong idea of the hub as a film recommendation system could not learn any new information, had more difficulties in achieving the goal, and reported the worst experience. (see img ‌ ) The user Mental Model was not changed at the end of the interaction even though could make hypothesis about the application potentialities that were not being exploited.

Wrong Mental Model

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Recommendations Here will be reported the recommendation given to the developer for the application redesign

1. Make sure to generate in the user the correct Mental Model.

A correct Mental Model could be communicated through a guided set of steps that will lead the user into the system gradually and furthermore enhancing the user satisfaction in achieving straight away the goals enhanced by the system.

After registered, the user could be welcome in the application by a brief explanation and could be given some example of the application working. A personal, active, immediate and direct experience is more effective to understand the application functionality than an independent exploration of the interface. Active involvement is more rewarding than passive explanations, especially long written texts. The developer could design a few simple steps to drive the user inside the system in a more involving way that can, also, make it easier to remember the actions to perform. The first steps could be, for the user, to follow and complete a few request from the system, representing the possible tasks of interaction.

For example the application could show a clear interface with a message:

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•

CHOSE THE PREFERENCES FROM FACEBOOK TO IMPORT OR IMPORT ALL YOUR PREFERENCES

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DID YOU KNOW THAT “THIS ITEM” OF YOUR FAVORITES IS CONNECTED TO “THESE” OTHERS?

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YOU LIKED “THIS FILM” HAVE YOU SEEN “THIS OTHER ONE”? IT’S A ROMANTIC COMEDY WITH “SAME ACTOR/ACTRESS”

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BRILLIANT! THANKS!! ADD TO MY FAVORITE! - SHOW ME MORE

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DON’T BOTHER ME WITH THIS I DON’T LIKE IT SHOW ME MORE

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LOOK! THEY (OTHER COMMUNITY MEMBERS, SHOWING ICONS AND NAMES LIKED “1 2 3 – 10” ITEMS YOU LIKE. WANT TO MEET THEM AND SEE THEIR PREFERENCES?

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NAVIGATE

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CONNECTIONS! •

WOULD YOU LIKE TO MODIFY YOUR PREFERENCES? ERASE OR ORGANIZE THEM INTO PERSONALIZED CATEGORIES?

The first steps should be designed to give the users the perception of personalizing their profile and preferences while discovering and learning the system functionality and possibly making already new discoveries along the process.

The user can be set free to navigate only after the application has given the main information and the goal are communicated unequivocally.

This first steps have to be just a few not to take too long nor become boring.

The language of the task should be simple and as close as possible to spoken, natural language.

The users should be aware of the number of steps required and be able to see of the point they are.

This way also the most independent user will be involved without the negative impact of constrains. The option of free, non guided exploration, nonetheless, could be warranted by a “Skip and take me to the home page” button.

If this solution is not possible it is vital that the first elements of the interface shown to the users (e.g. tagline, search field, images, community hints) will simply and unequivocally represent the application purposes.

Elements that might create confusion or be equivocated should not occupy the centre of the interface. For example the search field, element that was misleading for the user with a fuzzy mental model, is, now, on the top centre of the home page, suggesting that the main utility of the Hub is the same as a search engine. (Img Hub 30/31/32) The search field and the box search could be better left aside.

2. The application conceptual base should be communicated at the first access, in the landing page, in a clear understandable way As the test proved the introductory explanatory text of the login page is not effective to achieve this goal. Possible solutions to simplify the process of fully understanding the hub for first time users, are, in a hierarchical order of preferability:

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a. the solution to problem 1 would sort out this problem too b. Allow the first access be a personalized page of the profile. (see also Purposes) where the interface communicates the conceptual base of the application, an interface that increases the value of the hub operation system, which relies on relations and connections and through their representation and visualization enhance the users to achieve their goals. If possible it should be a personalized adjustable and expandable profile (at present the only way to change the preferences is to modify the Facebook preferences) that includes an immediate visualization of recommendations, or a combination of them.

Solution assets: + allows a more direct achievement of the hub goal (finding interesting connections). + simplifies the understanding of the functionality principles, furthermore enhancing the user satisfaction in finding, immediately, useful or interesting items. + gives the user the possibility to design a personalized profile. Collaborating with the system the user will be involved in the organization of the preferences, discovering interesting information about personal interests. (Pinterest first steps are a good example) + overcomes the possible misunderstanding with commonly used search engine. For this purpose it is vital that the discovery hub is clearly differentiated from the search engine usage. + this solution can be ideal as well for the hub community (see “Community”). To enhance the community building, in fact, the profile page could include the creation of user circles with shared interests. The interface of Google + circles could be taken as an example. + offers more possibility to retain the user c. use animation to compose the representation see “Further recommendation – animation and transition” d. Change the interface of the home page in order to show the functionality of the hub. Choose to visualize the connections and net creation among items, straight from the home page.

This solution will let the user discover new information from the first interaction.

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It is advisable to postpone the random discovery possibility from the “random community interest”, making it reachable by a link, to a second moment, when the user will be confident with the application potentialities and will be open to fulfil new goals driven by curiosity.

This option is not necessarily an alternative to the point a. and b. that can be combined. To this purpose, for example, the graph visualization, that has proved to be effective in suggesting the core functionality of the Hub, can be used. e. Provide a short document with explanations of the Hub functionality that can be reached at any time through button-link.

The explanation could be - a simple text - a short video that can be conceived like a short promotional or advertising e.g.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QRO3gKj3qw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9cPF6mPamQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_xUuf8aYEA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY

http://www.dueminutiperemergency.it - a set of images to slide. This option is not necessarily an alternative to the previous ones that can be combined.

3. Make explicit the results criteria Since it’s impossible to imagine every users criteria it is necessary to let them adopt the system criteria.

To enable the user to accept and adopt the system criteria they have to be made clearly explicit. The system relies on semantic ontology that is vital to humans to understand the structures of concepts and relations. This resource of the hub should be valorized and visualized. A modified visualization of the graph could be the best solution to achieve this goal. (see “Recommendation about the graph”) The results could be given saying “this result is proposed to you because ...” Visualizing the common elements together with the results could help solving the problem

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4. Organize the results display – the detailed list a. Uniform the result pages reducing the navigation possibilities. At the moment two kind of interactions are possible with the displayed result.

It is advisable to take the user to the essential in a quicker easier way. The result page visualized now after a click on the image is not the correct answer to the users’ goal, the user wants to see why an item is connected to another and learn more information about it. The page displayed after a selection should first of all show the common elements the criteria for the connection and any information useful to understand why two elements are connected and also should show the main information about the item itself and the contents related. b. Visualize the graph first.

The page visualized after the click on the image could be the detailed list version with the graph open. (see picture ) This way even if the common element is not very relevant the user won’t be frustrated having reached the required information in just one click. c. if it’s possible make a hierarchy of common elements and filter the results For example United States or New York City might be quite a general element of connection.

The list of items connected by this elements could be quite long and rarely it’s useful to discover that two things or two people are connected just because of the provenience country, or because they are living people.

This would require a refine in the system working other than an action on the interface.

This information can become interesting if a user wants to formulate a statistic or compare localization or find outstanding elements, but none of this goals corresponds to the intended goal of the developer, furthermore the comparison is not possible anyway through the graph representation that includes only the two items.

Since it’s not easy to judge that some common elements are less important than others a good way to overcome this problem could be visualizing the results according to the 162 | 163

number of common elements, putting first the items with a direct connection and afterwords items with a progressively minor number of connections.

5. Organize the results display – the mosaic The developer should make a decision on the effectiveness of the mosaic display on the light of the problems reported.

Keep the mosaic If wants to keep the mosaic visualization for the effectiveness of the images: a. The mosaic may be organized to enhance the visualization of relations. The connections and relations recommendation mechanism of the hub can be expressed in the mosaic using different visual channels. eg. starting on the top left corner the pictures around could be the connection with it. The closest could be those items with more common elements and progressively those with less connections elements will be positioned further to right and bottom sides. The dimension could also be used as a channel for the relevance or encoding the “dimension” of the item represented. b. The dimensions of the images could be used to represent the relevance of the items they represent and at the same time their connection among each others e.g. the dimensions can be proportional - to the numbers of the item represented links - to the contents it contains (video, immages, plain texts...)

- to the number of views - to the time distribution (bigger = more recent).

- to the relevance of an item on respect to a registered user “favourites” (semantic relational meaning of the property of the icon of an item) - to the number of the community members sharing that topic as a favourite. c. The position results could be always the same to help the user recognize the elements.

On top of the page the file with the information and contents,

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that now are reachable only clicking on the relative node of the graph.

This solution will enable the system to show information in a quicker way reducing the delay of time waiting for the results to be found.

For example: •

top left first the country of provenience and connected other countries where the architect worked

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second left the field architecture as discipline and main architects style associated

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people connected directly

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people connected indirectly

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etc.

This organization could be applied for any item. The regular user might want to personalize the interface and chose where to put the categories according to his preferences. d. A registered user home page could contain items filtered according to personal “like” or preferred topics, increasing this way the chance to get more information about them.

For example the first item (top left) could be one of the favourite item of the user, this way a user will have more chances to get more information about them in one click. e. The mosaic could be enriched with interaction enabling the user to get informations straight away. e.g. On rolling over an image a box could be opened with: •

The connection elements and similarity criteria

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A box with a graph of the connections of that item

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both of them

This option could also be integrated with the first solutions mentioned.

This way the user will easily and quickly evaluate if wants to get more information on that item and access to the more complete page or not.

Change the mosaic In the home page could be considered the possibility of a simplified graph representation with the connection among 164 | 165

the items, helpful to understand the core idea of the hub and show its usefulness.

The mosaic of random community interest could be moved to another page of the site to preserve the random discovery possibility.

6. if the system cannot warrant a relevant ranking of the results avoid it The actual ranking is not meaningful for the users and doesn’t meet the users ranking criteria. It would be advisable to avoid the numbering.

Further recommendations Use lifecycle The test was performed, by necessity, only on first time users. A different typology of users refers to those users who already know the application and access it the following times after the first.

Why should a user become a regular?

What information might look for daily?

Why do users, with personal profiles on virtual communities, access them frequently?

What can the hub give to those users?

Taking into consideration the product use lifecycle it is possible to distinguish different typology of users: •

occasional

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frequent

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regular

The occasional is a user that will access the application only in the attempt to satisfy a specific goal, for example find similar items or discover connections to a specific preconceived one. A frequent will be that user who having appreciated the system potentialities will exploit it frequently to discover new information or unexpected items. Curiosity and spare time are main requirements for this case of use.

Developer goal: users retention, make the user a regular

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A user, instead, will access the system on a regular base if it will provide interesting update or will suggest new information or connection without the specific request of the user enabling motivated random discovery. The interface and thus the interaction should be designed taking into consideration this different levels of access.

The developer goal designing the interface and the functionalities for those users who already know about the system is: retain the users generate users’ curiosity generate the users need of the hub show the users’ a new way of getting information and keep updated Home page - Regular user

Developer goal: stimulate users curiosity enhance contextualized discoveries

In the home page the images displayed could be the nodes connected to an actual topic. The items could be taken from daily interesting facts or news. Among a choice of five or six, a different one could be loaded at any navigation session or page refresh.

This solution would stimulate the curiosity of the user, who will want to check the hub home page everyday to know daily news and be updated and, at the same time, finding relations with “news” and du-jour topics and discovering new information connected to the topic, that might give better, wider comprehension and knowledge of it, without having to perform a separate search.

The chosen topics could be general or even personalized on the base of the user preferences.

An example: today’s December 06 2012 news Architecture - Oscar Niemeyer died Facts - John McAfee arrested in Guatemala Art - Raphael work fetches record price Cinema - Kathryn Bigelow and Steven Spielberg win New York Film Critics awards

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Community The developer should make a decision about the importance of the concept discovery hub community.

A decision should be made: keep the community The community should be valued and enhanced for different reasons: - a community member can suggest similarity of items allowing the discovery hub to become an effective recommendation system - being part of a community with shared interest is involving - a community can be potentially a motivating reason to discover other items on the base of a supposed similarity of interests with other members.

Thus the community can be organized around shared interests and topics. a user might be part of more than one community created inside the hub on the base of shared interests (eg. Photography, French cinema, expressionism etc.) For this reason in the home page, for example, it could be interesting to find links to the members who are interested in one specific topic.

Nonetheless if it’s decided that the community is kept it will be necessary to improve the possibility of interaction and augment its presence in the interface.

Applying the frameworks I questioned myself Why is it interesting seeing “random community interests”? why a user curiosity is stimulated seeing the pictures of this mosaic?

What kind of utility is this one? What potentiality of the system is conveyed by this element?

In the mosaic there can be both known and unknown items.

The mosaic of “random community interests” can be important for what concerns unknown items. The user curiosity, in fact, can be stimulated by a simple cognitive process that pushes to want to understand why somebody was interested in an item, assuming that it might possibly be interesting to decide if the interest is agreed.

In this case the mosaic representation fits very well the randomly chosen item displayed. For this reason the mosaic of “random community interests” should be kept but more efficiently be moved to a different page reachable trough a menu link.

Developer goal: enhance community building and recommendation system

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It could also be interesting if the random community interests mosaic could communicate some meta-information.

For example the images attributes (dimension and position), might show a percentage of interest on one item and associate (by closeness) topics searched most frequently.

The community mosaic displayed to a regular user might show new items preferred by new users, the regular user will thus be able to follow the growing of the community, individuate new users with preferences in common and might decide to “follow” their updates. The community might enhance the users collaboration and recommendations effectiveness.

Giving the users the possibility to mark and point out the discovery of similar items (films, music, etc) it is possible to create a recommendation system with a scale evaluation. 6 For example: - I have looked for the film “Juno”, I have discovered the film “Bella”.

- I have seen this film proposed by the application and it enabled me to live a similar cinematic experience.

- I mark this discover so that in my profile preferences the new discovers will appear as connections from the source item.

- The system might give the chance to other users to visualize such choices, for example to all the users with the same item in the preferences.

- The system might give the possibility of “seeing the story” of a discovery, thus, making the criteria explicit, will enable them to evaluate the discover and make their own decision. b) erase the community If it’s decided that it’s not a major topic of the hub, its central place in the home page should be changed.

If the “community building” is not an important goal of the hub the random community interest could be left aside reachable through a link and the home page main part of the interface could be occupied by more pertinent content.

To bypass this problem it could be enough to change the name of the mosaic erasing “community”.

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Graph representation At the moment the graph changes the position of the nodes any time it’s loaded, it can often be quite complicated when the connected nodes are many and it doesn’t allow to understand the nature of the connections, so if possible: a. put the source item always in the same position (left or right) b. use a grid (without visualizing it) to order the items creating lines and columns (that can also suggest a hierarchy if needed) or put the nodes on virtual concentric circles (no need to be visualized but useful to give organization and prevent messy graphs) c. use position to create groups Nodes that appear close to each other will be perceived like similar or connected (Law of Proximity, Law of Similarity Gestalt Laws of grouping)7 This way the graph will also create subsets of data that facilitate the mental model building of the topic. For example some items are the connection node that creates the relation when it’s not direct, some other items instead are connected to one of the two main node directly and this is what creates the connection also to the other one. It’s advisable to make clear this distinction for example not visualizing the link to an item that results connected to another through a third one. d. use interactivity to visualize the linking lines e. categories could be put outside the nodes naming a group of items f. items connected trough a category should be more far than those connected directly and could be displayed in an ordered way around the category g. names of the nodes are more important than the dots representing the node that should be on the foreground h. names of the nodes are more important than the lines representing the link Since the human brain is able to recognize a line even if is interrupted (Gestalt laws of grouping, Law of Common Fate, Law of Continuity, Law of Good Gestalt) it is possible to overwrite the lines with a text worth a with background that will simulate the interruption of the line that continues on the other side of the text.

Developer goal: enable the graph convey useful informations

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i. Nodes representing items of different nature should be encoded in a different colour This will facilitate recognizing items similar and understand more quickly the nature of the relations as well. Once explored one connection the experience will allow to repeat the same conclusions for the other items associated with same colours. k. consider the opportunity of using colored lines to visualize interactively the connections. The color of the linked node might give the color to the line to simplify the connection detection and associate it with the link.

Animations and transitions Developer goal: enable the user follow the conceptual composition of the results

The possibility to exploit animation and transition to suggest the semantic process performed by the system in the background should be considered. Animation could metaphorically represent what the data are displaying and the position of the user with respect to the ontology.

For example: getting into details could be represented by a zoom and going back to the source item could be a zoom out – from details to general picture – elements con be shown or hidden dynamically according to the level of details or complete image. This solution would open the exploration to a higher interactive level and would also better represent the connection concept. In fact the results displayed are limited, as it is now the result representation put a strong border a gap between elements that is not real. From every item among the data of DBpedia it is possible to follow a semantic path that will show the connection with any other.

The limited result display is not coherent with the system working.

Nonetheless a selection of top items should be evidenced to suggest to the user their relevance easing the discover of most important results first.

Interactivity – make it more agile

Developer goal: enable the user discover information more quickly and warrant a better overall digital experience

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For the successful use of the discovery hub a very important aspect is the interactive collaboration required from the user.

This aspect can be a strong point of the application, in fact, if the interaction is pleasant and agile it can be more involving and immersive.

Furthermore accidental discovery can be enhanced by a more responsive interface, in the process of performing a task to achieve a specific goal. For example while looking

for a specific information (even if this goal is not, at the state of the art the main goal achievable with the application) the users were making unexpected discovery, despite the fact they were not feeling free to dig further into the details without the tester encouragement.

As said, only the user who had a wrong MM of the application and considered the Hub a Movie recommendation system could not discover any interesting information. Being too focused on a specific goal and conditioned by the wrong mental model, the user was not open to digging into information, the curiosity was not stimulated and the frustration of not being able to achieve the goal was preventing the possibility of a wider exploration.

It is advisable that information could be visible in a quicker and easier way. In fact it requires a few actions from the user to arrive to the point were the nature of the relation is explained and in case of lack of time or not very active user this could prevent the discovery.

For this reason the interface and the interaction should be less rigid and faster allow the user to get information without reloading the whole interface or moving it entirely.

Possible solutions: •

Information on mouseover should be exploited more

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common elements or graph could be visualized on windows appearing on mouseover

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sliding results horizontally by category could avoid the necessity to scroll down the entire page, avoiding as well to have the user lost in the navigation with no reference about the source item.

Interface organization The interface should be designed to always warrant the bigger, central space of the page to the most significant informations.

For example the popular search on top of the home page or the buttons of the categories on the top of the detailed list visualization that occupy half of the space at disposal on a 1440x900 screen. It is important that the developer decides on what support the hub will be used considering the average dimension of the users monitors and devices.

Developer goal: enable the system optimise the space and enhance a pleasant navigation experience

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Sketches of mockups for the application interface redesign

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Conclusions The evaluation allowed to outline the importance of usercentred design and mental models awareness. Taking into consideration user Mental Models is important for the developer, firstly, to make the most effective choice in communicating the application purposes and functionalities and prevent misunderstanding.

A correct mental model, and a correct knowledge of the application and its purposes is essential for a successful, satisfactory experience. Intuition based interaction is strongly dependent on users’ knowledge and correct mental model.

The more an interface “affords� a natural and appropriate interaction the less actions and steps are needed to perform a task and achieve a goal.

The application design, especially relatively to the interface, though, must take into consideration that the background and the mental model influenced by preconceived knowledge and personal experiences could be mismatching or misleading.

For example: - the user has a mental model of the application functionalities, based on personal experience - the user has personal criteria of choice that might not match with the system criteria 174 | 175

It would be a hard task to define a precise, detailed Mental Model of an application of a potential user and it is almost impossible to forecast every possible kind. Each of the user tested, for example, approached the interface with different expectations performing different actions. Nonetheless it is necessary to be aware of the wide range of possibilities in order to avoid doubt and misunderstanding and furthermore, for the very reason of the variability of MM it is essential that the developer make sure to generate in the user the correct Mental Model.

Limits of the test conducted are: •

the hub potentialities haven’t been fully tested. The information discovery and semantic knowledge building should be further evaluated.

•

the users tested are not fully representative. It would be necessary to test on users not confident with the concept of semantic ontology or search engines workings.

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An evaluation on further access or regular users could be useful to better define their needs and goals throughout the entire use life-cycle.

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NOTES 1. Mental Models are representations of reality that people use to understand specific phenomena.

Donald Norman, in [27] “Some Observations on Mental Models”, Gentner and Stevens eds, Mental Model (pp. 7-14) describes them as follows: “In interacting with the environment, with others, and with the artefacts of technology, people form internal, Mental Models of themselves and of the things with which they are interacting. These models provide predictive and explanatory power for understanding the interaction.”

In [51] Norman D. “The design of future things” he also pointed out, that, there is a distinction between: •

design knowledge – refers to how a device work, the “backend” technology

•

system working users’ knowledge – the necessary knowledge of how to use a device to perform a specific task

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how it is actually used by the user

Hence, it is evident that a correct mental model, and a correct knowledge of the application utilities and purposes is essential for a successful, satisfactory experience.

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2. At this point it might be necessary to make a difference between “discover” and “find”. We might differentiate the two verbs saying that discover refers also to a casual, non predetermined goal. A discovery is the result of actions which goal was not necessarily set in advance, or different from the achieved ones. The result of random search is the discover of new items. A discover can also happen by chance while searching for other things. Find instead is meant to be the result of identifying the answers to specific questions, it can be defined as the positive result of a focused search.

Although as explained in an interesting paper, [01] “Discovery Is Never by Chance: Designing for (Un) Serendipity” P.André et al. “There is a richer space for design to support serendipitous creativity, innovation and discovery than has been tapped to date... Ideas might be encoded to be shared or discovered by “association-hunting agents”. The environment plays an important role to better enable serendipitous discoveries. This kind of reflections about the environment design are essential to the discovery hub development.

3. A name or a number itself is just a data. If I write “Inception”, I am only reporting an English word, a noun which ha has a meaning with different nuances, but which is meaningless out of a specific context. If I write “inception is a film” I am giving an information. Information, indeed, is given when two or more elements are put into connection. Relation is what create information (in this case identification – categorization).

To be comprehensible though the nature of the relation has to be explicit. If I write “inception” and “film”, it might be guessed that “inception” is the title of a film thanks to a personal, previous knowledge or experience without which it might be more difficult to create the connection between the two elements.

The necessity of formulating a comprehensible information will induce the user in try several plausible solutions (e.g. the inception of film – the relation of parts) without having any certainty.

In a sentence the type of relation is made explicit by the verb. Inception IS a film.

The same necessity of making explicit the relation and its typology is present in any visual symbolic representation. Symbols and other encoding channels, help communicating a meaning for example “inception” or “ “Inception” “ are perceived in different way because it is a shared known convention, in west culture, that capital letter and quotes indicate a proper name or denomination.

There is, furthermore a cognitive need, essential to build knowledge: the information has to be organized.

Human being organize instinctively data and information in mental maps. Organization of input is an essential need of human being to understand and remember the world. Only with a clear, organized map humans can make decisions, for example, are able to evaluate an information, decide if a topic is interesting or not, like or not, etc.

4. “Some biases affect decision-making, where the desirability of options has to be considered” Brave, S., & Nass, C. Emotion in human-computer interaction. The human-computer interaction handbook: fundamentals, evolving technologies and emerging applications, pp 81-96, in [33] J. Jacko & A. Sears (Eds.).

5. In regards to the importance of making explicit the criteria, I will report here an interesting conversation occurred with one of the volunteers the day after the test.

The user was not satisfied by the results given of relations with an known item, because personal criteria were related to emotions and subjective aspect. The day after the user came to tell that, had recognized making a mistake, and that after discussing with a friend about the results, has changed the personal opinion. The friend, indeed has explained why the items are connected and thus why the results can be considered good results. Showing the criteria, making them explicit, the friend enabled the user assume them to evaluate the results. The user did not change opinion about the fact that none of the results given was “perfectly matching the personal criteria and expectations” the user could though see the criteria of the results, understand and appreciate them. The user did not make a mistake, personal opinions cannot be right or wrong. Users should not feel that have made a mistake when the information fails to reach them. It’s a system task to make sure that the nature of the connections and the criteria are understandable enough to be reasonably assumed by the users.

6. [17] Drakos N. Item-based Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithms Computer Based Learning Unit 7. [29] Hachen M., Scienza della visione Spazio e Gestalt, design e comunicazione

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Il secondo step di valutazione del toolset si è svolto in una sessione collaborativa con la partecipazione dei ricercatori e sviluppatori del caso studio.

L'incontro aveva l'obiettivo di valutare l'efficacia e l'usabilità del toolset nell'aumentare la consapevolezza dell'utente finale e sostenere l'approccio user-centred. Verificare l'efficacia del metodo collaborativo è stato utile per definire evidenziare i punti di forzae di debolezza del prototipo del toolset di strumenti e per definire un corretto approccio a queste atttività. I risultati hanno evidenziato che gli strumenti e il metodo progettuale di design thinking possono condurre a una migliore comprensione dell'utente e delle sue esigenze e possono far emergere opportunità innovative del sistema. Alcune problematiche emerse dipendono dalla poca confidenza dei volontari coinvolti con il nuovo approccio e con gli strumenti proposti, confermando la necessità di una formazione al design thinking.

STRUMENTI: prototype - case study - interview

The second step of the evaluation was performed following the described collaborative process, using the frameworks and the toolset with the developers of Discovery Hub. The aim of the second step was to verify if the frameworks and the toolset can increase the awareness of end users mental models and goals and consequently improve the user-centred approach to the process.

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2 step Goals: •

to assess to what extent the developers had taken into account the user for the implementation of the application;

•

to assess the toolset utility in helping user-centred design approach and boost user awareness;

•

to test if a developer can actually and easily take advantage of the elaborated toolset to conceive the end-users behaviour and cognitive needs and thus understand the origin of the system problems that will enhance an optimised planning of the re-design of the system functionalities and interface;

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to verify the efficiency of the collaborative approach to exploit the frameworks;

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to test the inquiry method efficacy and define a correct approach;

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to highlight strong/weak points of the toolset prototype.

The second phase evaluation results will be useful to: - optimise the process and elaborate a model of frameworks application on the base of the experience done; - refine the toolset prototype.

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Evaluation session details - Context As said before the toolset can be used in different steps of the system developing process.

The second evaluation phase was held in the “prototype and test� step of the Discovery Hub design process, to highlight and understand the users problems and define the redesign of the system.

- Participants The evaluation session involved the developers: Nicolas Marie - Discovery Hub inventor and developer Damien Legrand - Discovery Hub interface developer Alain Giboin - HCI expert as supervisor - Duration Approximately 3 hours - Materials internet connection 2 computers (+ cables) 1 spare room 1 desk 1 video camera 1 printer 1 white board or 1 flipchart board colored markers colored post it white sketching paper pens and markers toolset templates 1 projector + cables

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Sketches for the 2nd evaluation preparation

- Evaluation criteria With the goal of helping the developer thinking as the user, the evaluation criteria are based mainly on the developer feedback and comments given during and at the end of the process.

After the interview, in a debrief moment, the developers were proposed a questionnaire reported further on to state the usefulness of the design thinking toolset.

- Procedure The second step of the evaluation consisted in an interview with the developers.

The developers had, firstly been informed of the research purposes and the evaluation goal of exploiting the toolset templates prepared.

A set of slides (reported in the following pages) were

Slides for the interview

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Inform the developers of the research goals

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Inform the developers of the interview goals

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Define the step of the application design process

Explain the inquiry process and the meeting procedure

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Assess the user profile before the inquiry process

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Start the inquiry method definining a user profile

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WHAT'S HIS / HER NAME?

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prepared and projected on the screen from the interviewer computer.

During the interview on a second computer the developers were visualizing the Discovery Hub. Goal: to assess to what extent the developers had taken into account the user for the implementation of the application

After the participants were informed of the entire meeting procedure they were asked to give the description of the user they had in mind in designing the application to assess their awareness of the user profile, mental model, expectations and goals.

In addition to the answers of the developers, design documents were used. Since no specific material was available defining the user profile and the scenario envisioned for the design, two papers and a presentation of the application were analysed.

As the images in these pages show, the developers explain

Developers description of the application analyses.

Colours Legenda Highlighting the elements was useful to assess the user awareness of the developers during the design process that lead to the prototype.

User Mental Model

1 = exploratory search engine User Profile – WHO? 1 = he Context of use – WHEN? WHERE? 0 User goal – WHY? 3 = discover things he might like or might be interested in, film recommendation related to writers, complex and composite recommendations User motivation – WHY?

that can interest me? What can I discover?

User task – HOW?

System contents – WHAT? System functionalities – WHAT? System potentialities - WHAT

The text on the right is the Discovery Hub landing page introductory text.

Despite the fact that this is not the context where the user is described it is useful to understand what goals are communicated to create the correct mental model of the system.

2 = thirst for discovery and knowledge, widen his knowledge and

cultural horizons as I am interested by Claude Monet what are the other objects

8 6

13 3

Discovery Hub landing page introductory text of the beta version

Want a film recommendation related to writers you like? Want to discover bands at the crossroad of an electro and rock record-labels you like? Interested by more complex and composite recommendations based on your deepest interests: a writer, a film and a band combination? Or maybe something simpler ;) ?

If you have a thirst for discovery and knowledge, Discovery hub has answers for you.

Discovery hub is an exploratory search engine which helps you to discover things you might like or be interested in. It widens your cultural and knowledge horizons by revealing and explaining unattended information.

Based on Wikipedia data, Discovery Hub is cross-domain and works on numerous topics including music, cinema, literature but also politics, automobile and much more. It allows performing queries in an innovative way and helps you to navigate rich results. As a hub, it proposes redirections to others platforms to make you benefit from your discoveries (Youtube, Deezer and more).

Discovery hub is a research output from a Phd thesis. It makes extensive use of semantic web data and technologies. Research, back-end: Nicolas MARIE; Web design, front-end: Damien LEGRAND. See what your curiosity will offer you and start:

Discovery Hub presentation during Semanticpedia day (program below), french subtitled in english.

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“we help the user to make discoveries related to a topic of interest, Claude Monet for instance using the knowledge contained in Dbpedia organize his navigation and give explanations on relations we propose.

Indeed you will see that we rely mainly on connextions between persons, places, objects in general to

the system functionalities, contents and potentialities but there’s a lack of elements defining the user and the scenario of use.

The results from the texts analysis are confirmed by the answers given at the beginning of the interview when the user was defined as: •

generic user

•

everybody

•

mainly man

A this point the interviewer started the inquiry process (described in session “inquiry process”) to collaborate with the developers tracing a scenario of use of the application.

Discovery Hub: a discovery engine on the top of DBpedia using real-time spreading activation 4.4 Discovery Hub: an operational prototype

Discovery hub20 is based on the RTSA algorithm. It is an exploratory search engine which helps user to discover things he might like or might be interested in. It aims to widen his knowledge and cultural platforms to makes user benefits from his

horizons. a hub, it introductory proposestext redirections to tierce Discovery HubAs landing page of the beta version

discoveries. Third-party services are proposed accordingly to the type of the considered resource e.g. music service for a Band or tourism platform for a Museum. Several demo videos are available online.

Want a film recommendation related to writers you like? Want to discover bands at the crossroad of an Users can start with an entity search thanks to a DBpedia lookup or use an import of third-party electro and rock record-labels you like? Interested by more complex and composite recommendations applications declared interests e.g. Facebook likes. In this last case an entity recognition is performed based on your deepest interests: a writer, a film and a band combination? Or maybe something using rdfs:label properties and the DBpedia lookup. simpler ;) ?

Then results exploration is facilitated thanks to various facets and filters. Classes encountered during Ifthe youpropagation have a thirst forused discovery and knowledge, Discovery hub has you.5). Discovery Hub are to build facets (e.g. Band, Film, visible on answers the left offor figure

The text on the left is an extract from the paper "Discovery Hub: a discovery engine on the top of DBpedia using real-time spreading activation."

also proposes a “top” un-faceted results list.

Discovery hub is an exploratory search engine which helps you to discover things you might like or be Classes are decreasing QSRD count order.

Sets by of filters are proposed usingunattended DBpedia interested in. selected It widensinyour cultural and knowledge horizons revealing and explaining categories e.g. The Rolling Stones results Film facet results proposes “american rock music film” and information. “films directed by Martin Scorsese” filters. Filters have a cumulative effect.

Based on Wikipedia data, Discovery Hub is cross-domain and works on numerous topics including To foster discovery we put in evidence categories (i.e. filters) with a low degree by presenting them with music, literature also politics, automobile and much more. allows performing queries in an drive user in unexpected browsing paths andItthus augments the discovery clearercinema, colors. It aims to but innovative helps you to navigate rich results. As a hub, it proposes redirections to others potential ofway theand application.

platforms to make you benefit from your discoveries (Youtube, Deezer and more).

When a user is interested or intrigued by an item he can ask for 3 different explanations thanks to three features (see First,output a feature the seed and results common Second Discovery hub video18). is a research fromshowing a Phd thesis.

It makes extensive use ofproperties. semantic web data and crossed references in Wikipedia pages between the twoDamien resources if they exist. afeature identifying technologies.

Research, back-end: Nicolas MARIE; Web design, front-end: LEGRAND. Third, a feature showing the relations between the result and the query-resource in a graph format.

theyour usercuriosity goes over nodeyou its and abstract When See what willaoffer start:appears on the left. It is possible to get more information from the graph with the “see links in Wikipedia” functionality highlighting graph neighbors in its Wikipedia page.

Discovery Hub presentation during Semanticpedia day (program below), french subtitled in english.

“we help the user to make discoveries related to a topic of interest, Claude Monet for instance using the knowledge contained in Dbpedia organize his navigation and give explanations on relations we propose.

Indeed you will see that we rely mainly on connextions between persons, places, objects in general to

provoke the discoveries and favour the learnig.

The system is not limited to cultural content. You might see on the home page companies or fictional

characters. Here the application will answer to question: “as I am interested by Claude Monet what are the other objects that can interest me? What can I discover?

First results are presented in the form of a mosaic offering an overview.

On the left you see relevant categories that have been automatically identif ied.

The user can use it to browse the results. One interest of the service is that it provides results mixing domains.

Starting from a painter the application retrieves films that have a strong link with him.

It constitutes peripheral knowledge potentially interesting for a discovery objective.

The second text is the english translation of Nicolas Marie presentation speech of Discovery Hub at Semanticpedia day.

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Generic user Everybody Mainly Men Web user Online community member Students Researchers Age 15/40 WHAT IF ARE WOMEN?

Tech oriented Curious Open

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USER PROFILE CHANGE OVER TIME ALONG THE PROCESS DEVELOPMENT User profile grows, characteristics, thanks to the inquiry method, become more detailed showing new possibilities.

Cultural interests Have passion for art/music/cinema Dynamic WHAT IF IS A PROFESSIONAL?

Journalists Djs Teachers Professors

Active Playful WHAT IF IS AN EXPERT ON A TOPIC?

Fan of ...

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The first step was answering the question “WHO?” to identify a user profile.

To help this step the interviewer exploited the user profile template prepared (template “user profile”). Furthermore, to help the developers envisioning a real “persona” and adding details to the “generic user” indicated as the end-user, some magazines and photos were proposed from which to chose the intended end user and extract their features and characteristics.

Pictures were useful also to envision a context of use and take into considerations possibilities that weren’t considered before.

During the second step answering the question “WHAT?” the intended application contents and potentialities were highlighted.

In this step the interviewer exploited the template “potentialities/motivations to help defining the potentialities of the application and conceive the users’ motivations to use it.

Sketches of the inquiry method storyboard 188 | 189

Following were proposed the questions “WHEN?” and “WHERE?” to define the context of use.

In this first stage the WHAT IF ..? approach was useful to suggest possible different user mental model of the system and contextualized scenarios.

Proceeding with the inquiry the developers were asked the question “WHY?” to formulate specific possible goals of the users.

With the aid of the taxonomy of tasks and goals (tasks/goals references) the interviewer suggested some “What if …” circumstances (for example “what if the user wants to get more details about history of an item?”, ” What if the user wants to find familiars of a specific subject”, “what if a user wants to mentally put an item into a personal category?” “ What if emotional elements are more important criteria for the user to evaluate an item?” What if a user wants to compare the geographical distribution of an item?).

These questions were useful to identify also users unconscious goals.

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The template “sketch the ontology”, prepared was used in support of this moment when the developers sketched the semantic structure of the information to highlight which part of it to show and to understand if and how the algorithm can enhance the highlighted goals.

Finally the developers were asked “HOW?” the application enhances the achievement of the defined goals.

This step was useful to verify the application effectiveness and to envision how the user could better interact with the system to get those information and achieve the goals and how the developer itself would proceed.

The developers were asked to interact with the system in order to achieve the goals outlined and simulate the user experience in the envisioned scenario.

During the entire process the answers were reported on coloured post it added progressively on a white board completing the scenario.

The use of post-it facilitated the possibility of adding information and move the answers to most appropriate location.

Results During the process the user profile grew considerably. The envisioned end-user indeed emerged to be more complex and detailed than the developers were able to state at the beginning.

Goal: to assess the toolset utility in helping user-centred design approach and boost developers awareness of the end-user to test if a developer can actually and easily take advantage of the toolset to conceive the end-users behaviour and cognitive needs and thus understand the origin of the system problems that will enhance an optimised planning of the re-design of the system functionalities and interface.

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Many elements of the actual use of the system and many users’ features emerged thanks to the enquiry process that enabled the developers becoming more aware of the user characteristics and limitations.

Exploiting the debrief schema the developers were asked to state to what of the reported tasks the process had been useful.

From the positive answers, reported in the following pages it is possible to say that the toolset is effective in driving usercentred design process and being applied on a working prototype the reflections that emerged are useful to plan the redesign of the interaction. It is preferable to refer to the interaction because the change to be performed are related not only to the interface of the application.

The experience indeed allowed to envision and define how

TOOLSET EVALUATION

Schema for the toolset evaluation

was useful to clarify and make explicit the charcteristics of the user and be aware of the people we address to

was useful to understand the difference between tasks and goals

we decided that we can use a design method to integrate the agile method we will partially change the system starting from users goals we should change the system to enable it to keep trace of the navigation we want to learn more about design thinking approach and methods

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we have taken notes of a list of things to change

have learnt to use that method and will remind about it for future projects.

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the user will reach the system. According to the developers plans the system functionalities could be integrated into a platform and be exploited in specific circumstantial contexts. This possibility should be developed to design the specific purpose of use and thus enhance the most interesting information to be showed first and in the most effective representation.

As state by M.Danziger “there are broader questions that can be asked about public infovis in the wild: how does the degree of integration with other site content (including physical placement of visualization links on the page) impact its use? Is there a certain level of functionality that needs to be made available (and obvious) to a user in order to convince them to interact with the visualization when the content can be retrieved through other channels? These types of questions cannot be adequately addressed when analyzing an infovis system outside of its natural habitat.”1 Furthermore it emerged that the working functionalities could be changed to enable the system meet goals that were not taken into consideration before.

A main aspect refers to the necessity to change the common user mental model relative to search engines and how to allow users discover the opportunities of a completely new functionality.

For what concerns the efficiency of the collaborative method it is important to observe that engineering methods and approach are quite different to Design thinking.

“Design thinking differs markedly from engineering thinking in at least one dimension: Engineering focuses on reductionism—reducing a design to its minimum requirements to achieve a goal. Design thinking may be the complete opposite—identifying as many alternative designs as possible that satisfy the most requirements and sacrifice perhaps only one or just a few.”

Goal: to verify the efficiency of the collaborative approach to exploit the frameworks; to test the inquiry method efficacy and define a correct approach;

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Working with engineers with a new method and unusual for them approach and tools require trust and confidence.

The experience done highlighted a first need for convincing the developers that the process was not an attempt to undermine the job done or criticize the development process followed.

At the beginning of the meeting, the developers declared their uncomfortable position. The starting prejudiced and defensive attitude though faded during the session and the

Design thinking can feel chaotic to those experiencing it for the ďŹ rst time. But over the life of a project participants come to see that the process makes sense and achieves results, even though its architecture differs from the linear, milestonebased processes typical of other kinds of business activities.

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results were able to catch their curiosity and interest.

Goal: to highlight strong/weak points of the toolset prototype.

An important reflection done is that usability aspects and users mental models and goals are not an easy issue for them, who are more oriented on the technological aspects and the inquiry method and the toolset were perceived as efficient in helping taking into consideration such vital elements.

Nonetheless, as they observed, they wouldn’t be able to exploit design thinking without being guided by an expert at least for the first times.

Hence some main conclusions can be traced.

On a higher level •

the importance of a multidisciplinary team that involves a design thinking expert;

•

the importance of including design thinking in engineering education.

On a lower, more practical level •

the need for instructions to exploit the toolset;

•

the importance of developers involvement activated also by an adequate environment.

A final issue refers to another aspect of the usability of the templates. At the end of the inquiry process it would be necessary to recap and sort the reflections emerged and elaborate an operational document that could recapitulate and systematize the scenario of use, the new ideas and the mockups making them available in the future for the refine and then the implementation steps.

the need for synthesis

The frameworks applied within the conceived process and exploiting the toolset prototype, were useful to define a new kind of constrains for the application. Other than the technological requirements design thinking helped defining the constrains relative to the scenario of use and to the user, included emotional aspects.

If the solid material used (post-it and paper) is good to take the needed distance from the technological aspects and problems, immerging deeper the developers into users’ and scenario envisioning a digital version would be helpful to keep and reuse the outcomes.

The moment of synthesis of the outcome of the inquiry method, (that is “all that is observed”, new ideas, data

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collected, topics about the user and the scenario etc.) should not remain private “in the head” of the developers nor “on scratch paper” hard to be reused and stored.

“During synthesis, designers attempt “to organize, manipulate, prune, and filter gathered data into a cohesive structure for information building.” Synthesis reveals a cohesion and sense of continuity; synthesis indicates a push towards organization, reduction, and clarity.”3 The design thinking toolset could be fruitfully integrated with tools and methods to enhance the “abductive” moment, base for the “planning” and defining steps.

NOTES 1. [07] Buxton B. Sketching User Experiences 2. [05] Brown T., Design Thinking 3. [36] Kolko J., Abductive Thinking and Sensemaking: The Drivers of Design Synthesis,

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usability is sustainability

Nella società attuale l’impatto dell’informazione e quindi la rilevanza di usabilità e accessibilità alle informazioni ha un valore determinante.

Come abbiamo visto nella sessione “why” l’era dell’informazione ha ridefinito il concetto di visualizzazione delle informazioni. A seguito delle innovazioni tecnologiche è corrisposto un cambiamento nel modo in cui ci rapportiamo alle informazioni.

L’interattività è ormai parte integrante della visualizzazione dei dati, e garantisce una vasta gamma di tecniche per esplorare il contenuto delle informazioni stesse.

Nuovi modelli di relazione con le informazioni richiedono nuovi modelli di visualizzazione adeguati alle nuove necessità dell’utente in funzione del contesto di fruizione.

Tra i principi riconosciuti di primo piano per un design sostenibile si ricorda la necessità di migliorare la partecipazione al processo decisionale e migliorare la qualità e l’accesso alle informazioni.

Le ultime ricerche dedicate al tema del design sostenibile focalizzano l’attenzione su quelli che sono gli strumenti e i processi di design nella convinzione che sia necessario definire innanzi tutto standard e modelli di processi per garantire la sostenibilità e l’usabilità sia del prodotto che della “produzione”.

Garantire l’usabilità delle applicazioni di visualizzazione di informazioni significa, quindi, innanzi tutto progettare un prodotto sostenibile.

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Questo inscindibile legame è stato il tema centrale della quarta edizione (2009) del world usability day dedicato appunto alla sostenibilità.1 Fondata nel 2005 dall’Associazione dei Professionisti dell’Usabilità, la “Giornata Mondiale dell'Usabilità” è un evento annuale che ha l’obiettivo di promuovere i valori di usabilità, ingegneria dell’usabilità e user-centered design per migliorare l’interazione con i prodotti digitali e “rendere tutto più semplice”.

“It’s about “Making Life Easy and user friendly. Technology today is too hard to use.

In order to humanize a world that uses technology as an infrastructure for education, healthcare, transportation, government, communication, entertainment, work and other areas, we must develop these technologies in a way that serves people first.”

L’evento adotta un tema diverso ogni anno e la scelta di dedicare la quarta edizione al tema della sostenibilità è motivato dagli organizzatori da una più sottile consapevolezza che amplia ulteriormente i confini del legame tra usabilità e sostenibilità.

Nathan Shedroff2, MBA in Design Strategy, pioniere del concetto di “experience design” e co-presidente dell’edizione della “Giornata Mondiale dell’Usabilità” dedicata alla sostenibilità dichiara: “Designers have an unprecedented opportunity to use their skills to make meaningful, sustainable change in the world”.

In un intervento pubblicato sul blog “Freedom Bits, Bits and bytes on software freedom” Georg C. F. Greve3, membro della fondazione europea per il Software Libero (Free Software Foundation Europe) e della associazione per l’open database (Open Database Alliance), cerca di dare una definizione di quali siano le richieste imprescindibili per poter riconoscere un prodotto digitale come sostenibile.

“Transparency: Access to know and understand the world around you, its power structures, and to the data & information to form your own opinion; Participation: You are not limited to watching events unfold, can participate in the political process, shape opinions and provide processed information on the grounds of the data that is available to you and others; Self-Determination: You define your own privacy, including for your digital environment, and determine how much of your information you are providing, and to whom.”

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Trasparenza, Partecipazione e Autodeterminazione sono le caratteristiche richieste ad un prodotto digitale sostenibile per valorizzazre l’informazione e garantire a tutti uguali opportunità di sfruttarla in maniera eticamente corretta.

Tuttavia la sostenibilità di un prodotto digitale va oltre la sostenibilità del risultatodescritta. Infatti per quanto, nonostante l’impegno e l’interesse internazionale verso l’argomento, ancora sia in fase elaborazione una definizione assoluta e condivisa di sostenibilità digitale o di sostenibilità del prodotto digitale.3 alcuni punti fondamentali, possono certamente essere definiti. Primo tra questi, un valore che viene riconfermato anche per il digitale come per il prodotto materiale, la necessità di tenere conto del ciclo di vita completo dei prodotti. A partire dalle specifiche tecniche e materiali e dall’impatto ambientale delle emissioni 4, dalle risorse energetiche è fondamentale considerare anche le questioni socio-tecniche e produttive connesse con la creazione e la gestione di “oggetti” digitali includendo lato hardware e software del prodotto.

SUSTAINABLE PROCESS

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USABILITY OUTCOME

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SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT

La scelta di un processo di design, e quindi dell’ambiente di progettazione e degli strumenti utili al progetto possono fare una differenza significativa, in termini di sostenibilità non solo per quanto riguarda la qualità e le caratteristiche del prodotto finito, ma anche in termini di costo e di velocità di sviluppo del progetto stesso.

La sostenibilità di un progetto di ricerca di una applicazione digitale, dal punto di vista del processo, si può definire in massima parte in base ai seguenti fattori fondamentali che riguardano l’impatto operativo del progetto: - il contributo del processe alla conoscenza scientifica dei settori di riferimento; - i tempi di realizzazione; - la riproducibilità del modello di design e sviluppo; - la scalabilità e adattabilità dell’applicazione.

In questo contesto la disciplina del design può intervenire per aiutare a definire modelli di processi collaborativi e sostenibili offrendo il contributo innovativo sia per l’usabilità del prodotto che nell’ottica di sostenibilità del processo.

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"

Dans un monde où l’attention est une ressource majeure des plus rares, l’information peut être un luxe coûteux car elle peut détourner notre attention de ce qui est important vers ce qui ne l’est pas.

Nous ne pouvons nous permettre de traiter une information simplement parce qu’elle est là.6

NOTES

"

1. http://www.worldusabilityday.org 2. [] Shedroff N.,Design is the Problem The Future of Design Must be Sustainable 3. http://fsfe.org/about/greve “Trasparenza: garantire l’accesso per conoscere e capire il mondo intorno e le sue strutture di potere,la disponibilità di dati e informazioni per consentire di formulare opinioni individuali; Partecipazione: la possibilità di partecipae agli attivamente agli eventi senza essere limitati a osservarne passivamente lo svolgimento, la possibilità di partecipare al processo politico, a formare opinioni ed elaborare e fornire informazioni sulla base dei dati disponibili da altri utenti; Autodeterminazione: definita come privacy individuale, anche in ambiente digitale, la scelta di determinare la quantità di informazioni che si vuole fornire, e a chi.” (trad mia) 4. http://www.digitale-nachhaltigkeit.ch/ 5. http://www.jenuino.com/2013/02/05/hosting-sostenibile-quando-il-mondo-digitale-diventa-green/ 6. Herbert Simon, quoted by Leca J. (1993) in Perret B. (2002) http://www.ondh.ma/pdf/eva09/Perret2.pdf

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considerazioni finali

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Abbiamo visto come l’era digitale e la pervasiva disponibilità di dati abbia generato una esigenza sempre più diffusa di strumenti di fruizione, analisi e gestione dei dati. In questo contesto team multisciplinari di ricerca e sviluppo di applicazioni di “information visualization” lavorano per fornire prodotti tecnologicamente sempre più evoluti ed efficienti.

Tuttavia, nella comunità scientifica, è fortemente sentito il problema di rendere le applicazioni soddisfacenti ed efficaci anche in termini di usabilità ed esperienza utente. Infatti nonostante la condivisa consapevolezza della necessità di un approccio progettuale user-centred, l’applicazione effettiva di questa strategia chiave risulta difficile.

Per garantire un buon livello di usabilità delle rappresentazioni delle informazioni e dell’interazione con le applicazioni le numerose linee guida e raccomandazioni non sono sufficienti.

Sono necessari strumenti efficaci, modelli di design e metodi di processo in grado di supportare ricercatori e sviluppatori in un percorso progettuale che valorizzi l’utente finale come risorsa utile sia a determinare limiti e vincoli del prodotto ma anche a definire le sue potenzialità e funzionalità.

Il design come disciplina può essere prezioso per aiutare ad affrontare queste sfide poste dall’era dell’informazione.

Gli strumenti, il metodo e l’approccio di design definiti come design thinking posso essere efficamente sfruttati per lo sviluppo sostenibile, user-centred di queste applicazioni digitali.

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Con l’obiettivo, quindi, di verificare il valore del design e aiutare a definire un modello di processo è stato elaborato il design thinking toolset presentato in questa tesi.

L’elemento chiave del toolset è rappresentato da design frameworks tipici delle discipline del design che consistono nelle 6Ws (Who, What, When, Where, Why, How) integrati dalla domanda “what if...?”

Lo scopo di rispondere a queste domande è massimizzare nello sviluppatore la consapevolezza delle esigenze degli utenti finali definendone i potenziali profili e mondelli mentali e fissando con chiarezza i loro obiettivi e il contesto d’uso dell’applicazione.

Le valutazioni, svolte su un caso studio, hanno dimostrato l’efficacia dei frameworks nello stimolare la consapevolezza del profilo utente e nel suggerire i suoi modelli mentali, le attività necessarie e soprattutto gli obiettivi e le aspettative, definendo scenari d’uso che tengano in considerazione fattori personali fondamentali quali le implicazioni emotive.

I design frameworks inoltre, sfruttati per effettuare una valutazione del prototipo del caso studio, hanno efficacemente contribuito ad identificare i problemi degli utenti e a formulare raccomandazioni per la riprogettazione dell’applicazione.

Un test condotto con approcci e frameworks diversi o altri strumenti diffusamente utilizzati (ad esempio le tecnologie di eye tracking, heuristics di usabilità di Nielsen, Jill GerhardtPowals principi di ingegneria cognitivi, metriche per visualizzazioni di informazione) avrebbe potuto rilevare con accuratezza i problemi che, in questa ricerca, sono stati definiti minori, quelli cioè dipendenti da difficoltà nell’interazione con il sistema, ma non avrebbe fornito spiegazioni utili alla comprensione dei problemi dal punto di vista dell’utente e, soprattutto degli obiettivi mancati che generano i problemi definiti più importanti.

Inoltre la maggior parte delle linee guida e delle “heuristics” esistenti può ben essere sfruttata in fase di valutazione di una applicazione. I design frameworks proposti possono invece essere utilmente sfruttati anche in step del processo precedenti e guidare quindi l’intero processo di progettazione.

Infatti, come dimostrato, i frameworks possono aiutare lo sviluppatore nel definire gli obiettivi previsti dell’utente e le potenzialità dell’applicazione per soddisfarli e quindi, in funzione di questi, contribuire a definire non solo l’inferfac-

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cia ma l’intera architettura dell’informazione del sistema e le sue funzionalità.

Molte ricerche dimostrano che il modo migliore per focalizzare lo sviluppo sull’utente è quello di collaborare con l’utente stesso.

Ciò nondimeno questa opzione, presenta alcuni limiti e problematiche. Nell’ambito della ricerca, in particolare, non è sempre facile trovare volontari che spesso vengono scelti tra un pubblico non completamente rappresentativo dell’utente finale. Inoltre, questa possibilità, richiede l’elaborazione di un prototipo più accurato e sviluppato ad un livello di precisione che potrebbe significare un grande sforzo in termini temporali per essere modificato, rielaborato e raffinato.

In ogni caso, anche potendo contare sulla collaborazione di utenti potenziali, per una efficace interazione con loro è di vitale importanza che lo sviluppatore abbia le idee chiare su quali informazioni raccogliere e come gestire questa collaborazione. Per questo motivo i frameworks proposti possono essere utili come supporto anche in un processo di co-design.

Perciò con l’obiettivo di agevolare l’uso dei frameworks è stato elaborato un prototipo di templates e suggerita una procedura collaborativa di approccio al processo di design.

Il toolset ha dimostrato di essere un supporto valido per sfruttare i frameworks e aiutare gli sviluppatori ad assumere il ruolo dell’utente e immaginarne il comportamento, i modelli mentali e gli obiettivi. Le valutazioni effettuate hanno consentito di comprenderne i punti deboli e le difficoltà per pianificarne l’ottimizzazione.

Più rilevante, inoltre, dalla valutazione del toolset emergono delle osservazioni fondamentali per definire il valore del design thinking in questo settore.

I frameworks e l’approccio proposti possono essere davvero efficaci se possono contare sulla collaborazione con una persona formata al design thinking e con un background sufficiente in HCI, user experience design e usabilità.

Si può quindi dedurre la necessità di promuovere una maggiore collaborazione in team multidisciplinari che includano anche designer.

Le competenze e abilità apprese nella formazione dei professionisti del design potrebbero essere, in ogni caso, utilmente, almeno in parte, integrati nella formazione degli 206 | 207

The toolset can be useful in different step of the design process

define

research

ideate

prototype & test

choose

learn

evaluation 1st / 2nd step

In the research was used

DT toolset

by a designer alone to evaluate a case study

DT toolset

by a designer with the developers to evaluate and redesign an application

It can also be exploited

DT toolset

by a developer alone to define ideate choose and evaluate an application

DT toolset

by a team in collaborative sessions

DT toolset

in co-design to collaborate with users

implement

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ingegneri per agevolare i processi di design-thinking.

Per questo scopo è necessario elaborare strategie educative e applicative ideali e ancora in fase di studio a partire da ricerche che possano aiutare a definire le esigenze anche a livello di competenze disciplinari e modelli di processo collaborativi.

Infatti, come detto in precedenza, il design-thinking è più efficace se può contare su un approccio collaborativo principalmente per due motivi: - design-thinking è al tempo stesso un atteggiamento naturale e uno strumento, il cui uso può essere appreso attraverso l’esperienza - “collaborative thinking” o “pensiero collaborativo” è in grado di dar vita ad una “intelligenza collettiva” (“collective intelligence”)2 in team multidisciplinari in grado sia di migliorare la qualità, l’usabilità e la sostenibilità dei risultati che generare nuovi stimoli e interessanti spunti creativi di ricerca.

“Collaboration” suffers from its history as a value-laden term, lacking substantive theory, method, or tools.”

Robert Axelrod’s pioneering study, The Evolution of Cooperation, given today’s specification of “cooperation” to refer to tasks where all contributors perform the same role (as in rowing a boat) and “collaboration” to refer to tasks where contributors may perform different roles, should have been titled The Evolution of Collaboration because all of his players bring their unique strategies to the game."3 C’è bisogno di sviluppare un metodo, strumenti e approcci efficaci per applicare e sfruttare le possibilità di questa intelligenza collaborativa alle sfide della sostenibilità.

In particolare nel settore della visualizzazione di informazioni c’è bisogno di definire un processo collaborativo che consenta di integrare le competenze per filtrare e interpretare i dati, riconoscere tendenze e definire la rilevanza delle informazioni in funzione degli obiettivi.

Ciò richiede un approccio collaborativo anche al processo decisionale di sviluppo dell’applicazione e di problemsolving che sfrutti strumenti per comprendere da diversi punti di vista, non solo quello tecnologico l’efficacia e le funzionalità del sistema.

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contribuire all’intelligenza collettiva contando sulla ricerca individuale.

Il macro obiettivo e metarisultato di questa ricerca è proprio aver indagato queste opportunità e aver riflettuto su dinamiche collaborative ancora da approfondire.

collaborative intelligence

DESIGN THE FUTURE FOR SUSTAINABILITY

NOTES 1. “(...) the likelihood of a successful design outcome is increased by forming teams consisting of members with complementary roles, a plurality of viewpoints, a neutral manager, and a “wild card”.

Lent et al. described the effect of collective efficacy, a team’s beliefs about its own capabilities to work together, on the cohesion and satisfaction of the team” [20] Dym C.L. et al. Op cit.

2. Il Center for Collective intelligence del MIT http://cci.mit.edu/ è tra i principali ricercatori e promotori di questa risorsa. Il loro obiettivo è indagare come possono essere sfruttate le opportunità offerte dall’era digitale e dalle moderne tecnologie che agevolano la condivisione di quantità di dati incalcolabili e la comunicazione tra un numero enorme di persone “While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities.

3. Zann Gill 2011 in http://collaborative-intelligence.org

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La tesi apre scenari di ricerca interessanti in diverse direzioni. In quest'ultima sezione vengono presentati brevemente i possibili sviluppi nelle 3 assi principali identificate che riguardano: - l'elaborazione e l'ottimizzazione del toolset e il completamento della valutazione - idee di design-thinking per il re-design e lo sviluppo del caso studio affrontato - l'approfondimento di alcune ipotesi di metaricerca legate alla collaborazione tra design e computer scientists per indagare le possibilità di nuovi processi progettuali e formativi

Further works and possible development of the research concern both the design-thinking and the optimization of the discovery hub: DESIGN-THINKING TOOLSET AND FRAMEWORKS

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•

refine the toolset;

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the third step of the evaluation phase has to be fulfilled by testing frameworks and toolset on other applications with other developers;

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evaluate the toolset in different scenarios (i.e. a team of developers, a developer alone, co-design with users) in different steps of the process;

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visual-thinking supports has to be refined to be used in the design phase with the developers;

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visual- thinking could be developed further to better suit the necessity of the developers more focused on specific needs of interactive information visualization design;

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an easy to use support has to be prepared and implemented, collecting all the elements, designing a digital version with more interactive supports;

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compare the proposed method with other UX's design methodologies developers training;

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compare the existing case studies of application of design-thinking to students training;

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design a digital version with more interactive supports

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define a model for the anvironment preparation on the base of existing case studies and examine the emotional implication of the process.

DISCOVERY HUB •

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what could be the logo of the discovery hub?

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how will be the hub communicated and diffused? What is the best strategy? What if it was integrated in other system?

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what if the hub had a mobile version? How should be designed the interface?

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What if the hub run on multitouch surfaces?

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what if the hub was integrated with the internet of things possibilities? Could the application communicate with the environment? For example geotags and localizations? Could new data be reached authomatically according to the place where the user is?

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what if the hub could have an AR version? When and where would a user use it? What would be the interface like? How could natural interaction improve the experience?

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... engineering training. Analyse existing design-thinking training methodology to be applied in developers education and elaborate a training model. What are strong and weak points and how can design-thinking training be effecively targeted to support knowledge and information engineers?

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... solving wiked problems related to information visualization. Exploit design tools and approaches to investigate and understand the difference between “discovery” and “recommendation”.

An issue, that emerges from the collaboration on the case study, is the difference between “recommend” a topic and “discover” an information.It would be interesting to examined with a design thinking approach. How can a design-thinking process be helpful in solving this question? What design theory can emerge from a research driven by this goal?

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... defining the requirement of an algorithm for spreading information. What would be the outcome integrating design thinking approach to the technical requirements in the design of an algorithm?

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... defining models of collaborative process to enhance sustainability in information visualization. What is the value of deisgn to collaborative process in multisciplinary team to develop collaborative knowledge and intelligence? What are the axis of research of the discipline to be developed to define a model and enhance multidisciplinary collaboratve results and methodologies?

DISCOVERY goals motivations

expectations

conscious

unconscious

emotional

cognitive

physical

RECOMMENDATIONS RECOMMENDATION goals motivations

emotional

cognitive

physical

expectations

conscious

unconscious

APPENDIX 215 | 222

APPENDIX A | 1st STEP TEST | SCENARIOS

Scenario 1 It's saturday evening, it's winter, it's raining no reasons to go out tonight so you have invited home a few friends to watch a film.

Chips, pop corn, pizza and bier are already there.

Tradition wants that you chose the film in turn and this time is your turn.

You have seen and liked a particular film (for example “Inception�) last week, and you know that most of your friends have liked it too, so you would like to see another like that one, one that has similar characteristics.

Before going to the video shop, just round the corner, to rent one or move to i-tunes to buy it for download you will want to find 2 possibilities, just in case the first choice is not available.

Also, you will want to take a note of another 2 films that you consider, after exploring the Hub, that are absolutely NOT interesting and you do NOT want to watch them because the Hub let you think that they will NOT meet your taste and interests, in order to remember them, and be careful to avoid them.

(The evening ends up being a great success and all your friend compliments you for the perfect choice!! Thanks Discovery hub!!)

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Scenario 2 It's friday, lunch time and you are chatting with some colleagues talking about films and one of them says that she loves Korean films. You don't remember having seen any of them so you ask for recommendation, being curious to discover the new world of Korean cinema. She gives you a title “My girl and I�.

When you get out from the office you run to the chinese restaurant to order noodles, spring rolls and almond chicken, to be delivered.

In the meantime you go home foretasting the oriental evening you will enjoy.

You take your laptop and go online to find this film unfortunately it is not available on any of the streaming services you know thus you decide to use the Discovery Hub to find other 2 similar films and 2 that you do NOT really want to see.

(In the end of the evening you will have enjoyed an involving experience with a lovely oriental taste, a great discover this Korean Cinema! Once again thanks Discovery hub!!)

APPENDIX Questionnaire

A | 1st STEP TEST | QUESTIONNAIRE

◦ How easy was it to achieve your goal?

Scenario a) goal 1. film to watch

¢ easy

¢ very easy

¢ difficult

¢ very difficult

¢ easy

¢ very easy

¢ difficult

¢ very difficult

¢ easy

¢ very easy

¢ difficult

¢ very difficult

¢ easy

¢ very easy

¢ difficult

¢ very difficult

Scenario a) goal 2. film NOT to watch Scenario b) goal 1. film to watch Scenario b) goal 2 . film to watch

Was it easier to find the 2 films you wanted to watch or the 2 you did NOT want? a) 2 film I wanted to watch can you explain why?

b) 2 films I didn't want to watch

_________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ ◦ If any, can you say what problems you have encounterd?

•

interaction problems using the interface

_________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ •

problems in fulf illing your goal (individuate and chose the 2 films you wanted to watch and the

2 you did not want to watch)

_________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ ◦ What helped you formulating your opinion and chose the 2 film you wanted to see? _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ ◦

What helped you formulating your opinion and chose the 2 film you did NOT want to see?

_________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ ◦ What elements of the hub interface was most helpful in finding your results? (common elements – wikipedia links – graph – picture – others)

_________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ ◦ Can you explain why you liked the film? What was it that made it interesting? What element/elements did you like of that film?

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◦ Can you list, in order of importance, what are for you the most relevant aspects that you took into consideration in making your decision? (eg. The plot, the piture, the number elements in common, curiosity, the typology of elements in common, etc) 1.

__________________________________

3.

__________________________________

2.

__________________________________

4.

__________________________________

5.

__________________________________

6.

__________________________________

7.

__________________________________

Do you know films that you know about and were expecting to find in the recommendation list but were not?

YES

NO

If yes which ones?

1 ___________________________________

2 ___________________________________

3 __________________________________ 4 __________________________________

If yes what are the elements that estabilish the connection between those films and the film considered? (eg plot, actors, soundrack, production, director, emotions, year/period of release, etc) 1.

_____________________________________________________________

3.

_____________________________________________________________

2.

_____________________________________________________________

4.

_____________________________________________________________

5.

_____________________________________________________________

How would you evaluate the whole experience of interacting with the Discovery Hub?  Interesting boring



challenging



difficult



useful



can't wait to have the application online to use it further for other discovers



Was it easy to understand the reason of the recommendations list?

Scenario a) goal 1. film to watch

¢ easy

¢ very easy

¢ difficult

¢ very difficult

¢ easy

¢ very easy

¢ difficult

¢ very difficult

¢ easy

¢ very easy

¢ difficult

¢ very difficult

¢ easy

¢ very easy

¢ difficult

¢ very difficult

Scenario a) goal 2. film NOT to watch Scenario b) goal 1. film to watch Scenario b) goal 2 . film to watch

Did the graph help you to understand the reason of the recommendations?

YES

NO

Can you say why?

_________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________________________________________________________

APPENDIX B | MINOR PROBLEMS 1. The interface doesn't offer the possibility of returning to a previous page. For example from the page with the information about an item to go back to the results page; 2. In the mosaics the icon of the “?” that will lead to the page relative to its information and contents is too small compared with the dimension of the image, especially because the page, where the connections among the items are displayed, is supposed to be, in order of importance, the first information to see; 3. The interface allows many navigation possibility but some of them could prevent the user from finding interesting things. For example, interacting with an image (click on its main part, not the “?” icon) the user arrives to the page that describes the selected item and gives more contents about it. This action though might prevent the user finding the page with the information about the connections among the two items. In this page the connections are not highlighted and the user must search for it reading the texts; 4. The “related to” mosaic of an item file often does not include the item that leads there 5. The related to mosaic displaying results related to both a source item and the result item is not easy to detect. The only way to detect that the contents displayed are relative to two or more item connected is reading the address bar; 6. The background graph animation is perceived as distracting; 7. The Wikipedia page is not interactive, the user must open a new tab or window, to read the full text in Wikipedia, because often the point highlighted doesn't give enough information to understand the context; 8. The interface allows the possibility to drag items that cannot be dropped anywhere. This interface behaviour is misleading and frustrating; 9. The search input field allows only to look for listed items and does not give feedback when an element is not recognized; 10. In the detailed list, tags under the item are not active but they look like they are because they change colour on mouse over. They can be confused with the filters on top of the page; 11. After signing in with a Facebook account the preferences are imported but then the user is taken to the home page where there is no further information or connections with personal preferences. The user cannot understand where they have gone; 12. The user cannot understand where the personal profile picture has been taken from and is bothered by the system accessing personal information; 13. The user expects external links both from the file relative to an item and from the result page to get more contents;

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14. The time needed by the system for loading the results can be quite long, depending on the connectivity speed. Users would like to be aware of what is happening on the background instead of watching a loading animation. The system could show the elaboration of the semantic connections, showing the building of the “ontology”. The elements progressively found as related and the items connected to the them could appear progressively. A dynamic progressive composition and fulfilment of the results would enhance the comprehension of the results criteria and structure.

Minor interface interaction problems detected by the tester during task accomplishments are: 15. The user doesn't find spontaneously the possibility of changing the visualization mode from “mosaic” to “detailed list” if not informed. This second visualization gives more information and is preferred by all the users tested; 16. The plot for films is an important element for the user to formulate an opinion.

This information is missing; 17. Categories are often too wide an comprehend elements in an ambiguous way; 18. Scrolling the long list of results the user loses the reference with the source item on the top of the page 19. After performing a query it is not possible to open the file relative to the source item. To get to the contents it is necessary to chose a connected element and find the source item in the “related to” functionality; 20. It is not possible to open the file of an item from the detailed list unless clicking on the node of the graph; 21. Images in the detailed list are not link but behave like they were; 22. The results given are not complete but the user might believe they are or might consider the application not very trustworthy because of the limited results given; 23. The hub doesn't suggest different research approach if a query is not successful. For example if a goal is difficult to be achieved starting from an element other solutions could be tried. The user instead leaves the application and go to other system which is more confident in interacting with. The second scenario was prepared for this purpose. The application might ask the user what kind of element is looking for, suggesting for example to restart a search from a category or summing up more items and refining the results using “filters”.

BIBLIOGRAFIA CITATA 223 | 231

Bibliografia citata [01] André P., Schraefel M.C., Teevan J, Dumais S.T. Discovery Is Never by Chance: Designing for (Un)Serendipity Proceedings of the seventh ACM conference on Creativity and cognition (pp 305-314), 2009 [02] Arapakis I., Jose J.M., Gray P.D. Affective feedback: an investigation into the role of emotions in the information seeking process SIGIR ‘08 Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, ACM New York, NY, USA 2008 [03] Beck K. et al.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development Agile Alliance. Retrieved June 2010 [04] Boy G.A. Cognitive Function Analysis (Contemporary Studies in Cognitive Science & Technology) Vol 2 Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1998 [05] Brown T. Design Thinking Harvard Business Review, June 2008 [06] Buchanan R. Good Design in the Digital Age GAIN: AIGA Journal of Design for the Network Economy. Vol 1. October, 2000 [07] Buxton B. Sketching User Experiences Morgan Kaufmann (Elsevier, Inc.), 2007 [08] Card S. K., Mackinlay J.D., Shneiderman B. (ed) Information Visualization – Using Vision to think Morgan Kaufmann, 1999 [09] Carpendale S. Evaluating Information Visualizations Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol 4950 pp 19-45 - Springer 2008 [10] Celaschi F., Il design come mediatore tra bisogni in [28] Germak C. (a cura di), Uomo al centro del progetto, Umberto Allemandi & C., Torino 2008

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