Belgian Usability Day 2008

The Belgian Usability Day was a success, the auditorium was full of usability people interested in sharing knowledge.

The first talk was about traffic congestion by Joannes Vandermeulen, founder of Namahn.  He gave an entertaining talk about how traffic congestion makes our life more difficult and gave some examples of how technology allied with usability could solve some of these problems. Even though the solutions are a bit futuristic, everyone can already do something today to decrease the traffic around us. It was not so motivating to know that most of the participants went by car... but the message was given.

The second talk was a Brussels Airlines case study by Audrey Benoit from Brussels Airlines and Raphael de Robiano from Emakina. They presented the process applied by Emanika to conceive and design the new website for Brussels Airlines. The main differential is that they performed a global user experience mission by following all the steps of any usual customer, such as to look for information, compare prices, book flight, checkin, travel, etc. It was a great talk, all the issues that the mission revealed were surprising and significant to bring about major changes in their products and services.

The third talk was about social networks by Amandine Feix-Villain from Groupe Reflect. She presented a different point of view that each person manages different facets of themselves, depending in which social network they are. For instance, someone's facet on Facebook (a more friendly and loose profile) is different from his or her facet on LinkeIn (a more professional profile). But... what about transportation? Am I able to "travel" easily from a facet to another? Am I the "driver" of my own facet information?

Well, there was a fourth talk, but unfortunately I had to leave at this moment because it was getting late and I had to take the subway and the train, a one-hour trip to get back home from Brussels to Louvain-la-Neuve. But it was certainly worth it, I had fun, learned a lot and saved a bit of traffic congestion ;-)

World Usability Day

World Usability Day is an initiative that promotes usability all over the world. This year's theme is about transportation. I am curious to see how we can be more aware of usability in transportation. On this day, the Global Transport Challenge will be launched in order to help us see how our transportation choices and actions impact our environment.

I will attend the

Look for an event registered in your town in the World Usability Day website and don't miss it.

Process-UI Alignment

It's been over a year since I've started working on analyzing the situation of large corporations, like banks and insurances, that have difficulties in identifying the impact that changes on business processes have on their enterprise systems. The main difference in our strategy is that we take the user interface perspective. One of the questions we answer is: Which user interfaces of these enterprise systems should be updated after changes on their business processes? 

Why do we adopt this perspective, when there are already several solutions for Business-IT alignment? There has been a new wave in business models that value innovation as a driver for business growth, as I've seen in the book I'm reading: The New Age of Innovation. For that to be achieve, one of the pillars of innovation in business is to consider one consumer experience at a time. And where is most of that "consumer experience" taking place nowadays? It happens online, such as when we consult our account balance in our Internet banking.

So we sustain that user interaction represents a rich source for business value! That's why we support business alignment with user interfaces. There is a long way to go to make this perspective part of the executive agenda, but Pradeep Henry has already highlighted his experience in aligning UI with business process. 

To learn more about what we mean by that, you can access Wikipedia, which already has an entry on this new and exciting subject with a link to one of our major publications, as you can see on the print screen below related to the subject Process-centered design.

Version 3.0

Today I am becoming... it's hard to admit, but yes... 30 years old... and such dates always seem an opportunity to appraise life. When we enter university and you are not even 20 years old, you typically say what you expect to achieve by the time you are 30. I surely remember those prospects.

Now is the day: have I achieved them?

Let's see: I have successfully graduated from the university, finished my Masters in Fortaleza, Brazil, I got married to a phenomenal guy, I got a scholarship to do my PhD (a longstanding dream) and I am working with a subject that deeply interests me. That's pretty good so far, I guess. But I admit I am a dreamer and I have lots, lots of other expectations for my future.  

I will not talk about all my wishes but I will mention a special one, which is the mystery of wines. I always appreciated but never studied them.  The last one I've had was a very special one: a Portuguese white wine, Planalto Douro. Planalto, as its name suggests ('planalto' is a Portuguese word that means 'plateau' in English), comes from a plateau region of the Douro. Planalto is a high quality, light, delicate and elegant wine. It has fresh flavors and it is intensely fruity. 

José Tribolet

Last week, I had the opportunity to talk to Prof. José Tribolet about our research ideas. He has been working with Organizational Engineering for over ten years and he has been organizing the Special Track on Organizational Engineering at ACM SAC for six years. He and his team have made major contributions for organizational design and engineering with a breakthrough view on the human perspective in this area.

He presented his main research contributions and Beto and I also talked about our research projects. The talk with him was very vivid, as you can easily imagine between Portuguese and Brazilians. In a few hours, he passed this great enthusiasm for academic research and projects in industry combined, a deep concern on fundaments allied with innovative thinking, involvement in details and thorough understanding of the main picture he envisions for his projects. When we arrived, the board had the division of work between all students so they all worked aiming at combined goals.

Just with few talks with him, you know that he is an outstanding professional with a great human side :-) 

But hearing it from someone who knows him more closely is even better, I was moved by the acknowledgements on Artur Caetano's PhD thesis and, if I may quote it: "Professor José Tribolet  [...] taught me that a PhD is about the process of becoming something else. It was his inspiration [...] that helped me in this transformation process of growing as a person and as a scientist, which I consider far greater than the contributions summarized in these pages." 

Reference: Artur Miguel Pereira Alves Caetano, Business Process Modelling with Objects and Roles, PhD Thesis, Instituto Superior Técnico, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal, May 2008.

Besides teachings for my research, I've confirmed something that I had been noticing in some people, which is to put your heart in what you do, everything that comes out is so much more appreciated by everyone.

IBM on Visualization of complex IT systems

Today I attended a lecture from Dr. Wim De Pauw at the IBM Forum Belgium. His talk and demonstrations were extremely enthusiastic and interesting. He talked about the visualization of complex systems and presented some tools for this purpose.

Jinsight is a tool for visualizing and analyzing the execution of Java programs, as shown in the figure below. For example, developers can view threads running simultaneously to identify the source of problems. Since it is for complex systems, you see little colored lines that are difficult to understand by novices. But, as he said, developers learn quickly to be like doctors reading cardiograms.

The web services navigator,  an Eclipse/RAD plug-in for interactive visualization of web service transactions, called my attention because it can also be used to link business logic with technology. Business analysts can view a topology of services and identify what was wrong. For me, this is especially interesting because I want to know how business analysts adapt to the IT world. How do they understand IT-driven visualizations?

Streamsight is a tool for visualization of streaming data that provides dependency analysis in which by clicking on one element, it is possible to know the other elements that are directly connected to it. This is particularly important to analyze and track elements of complex systems. 

Visualization is an effective way to communicate a message and it is useful to transfer information between people and to create new knowledge. This is essential for the interaction of different groups in the analysis of constantly changing information. 

My work also needs visualization since I am analyzing how to visually track changes from business processes to UIs. His lecture was very insightful for me in the search for innovative forms of visualization.

Presentation in Hasselt University

In January, during an exchange day between UCL and Hasselt University with the participation of researchers working with different areas of HCI (e.g. multimodality, ), I was invited by Karin Coninx to give a talk for master students of the Expertise Centre for Digital Media at Hasselt University, who were attending the course “User Centered Design”.

In May, there I was talking for several Flemish students (in English) about my work that proposes an original solution on how to align business processes with user interfaces of extensive enterprise applications in the context or large organizations, such as banks, insurances, industries, telecommunications, etc.

What called her attention about my work was that this traceability solution also adopts a perspective of a user-centered design method, which can be presented as a set of activities to be performed by professionals both in the business and IT departments. Such approach is very suitable for these students who were learning different approach towards user-centered design. In addition, they also learned about my practical experience with this solution in a large Belgian bank.

You can see the slides of my presentation entitled "A Model-Driven Approach to Align Business Processes with User Interfaces" below, also available at SlideShare.

A Model-Driven Approach to Align Business Processes with User Interfaces

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: user interface)

Google Colors

You, just like me, think that what Google does is very innovative. Everyone agrees that their complex is so cool, it's just the best. And it is!

But their initiatives are not that new... since the late 1920s organizational researchers have tried to overcome the limitations of a perspective that sees organizations as machines (such as bureaucratic structures). The result of many studies have demonstrated the importance of human beings and their needs in the workplace. It was the beginning of a perspective that built the idea that individuals operate better only when their needs are satisfied, just like biological organisms. Thus, organizations were starting to be seen as organisms (as open systems that are more adaptable to changes and to the environment where they are).

Following that approach, organizational theorists suggested a set of means to motivate employees at all levels of the need hierarchy, namely:

• physiological (salaries);


• security (health care plans);


• social (interaction with colleagues);


• ego (jobs with scope for autonomy, innovation).

This idea is so old and yet it gets more and more important each day. So when Google does all this, why does it seem so new, like we didn't know that this could be? Why does it look so innovative?

I feel the main difference is that they did it in a COLORFUL manner. Color was the innovation, the attraction, each color brought out a good feeling for their employees and for outsiders as well ;-)

UI-Business Alignment

I imagine that it would be great to make what was specified by business analysts "talk" to system analysts and UI designers. The "talking" part is very challenging because what is specified by business analysts needs to be well understood by system analysts and UI designers. Besides, UI designers work on aspects of user interaction and they need to be acknowledged by business analysts as an added value for achieving specified business goals.

We see here the case of specifications from different departments that need to be connected to develop enterprise applications. This connection is not supposed to be so tight as to make it difficult to let it loose when necessary. It is rather useful to make the association evident so whenever there is a need to change, it is easy to detect which parts also need to be updated.

I have analyzed the situation in which business analysts use spreadsheets to associate business processes to screens. The time spent to keep these spreadsheets up-to-date is so high that they need to allocate people only for this job. Worse yet when they allocate a skillful business analyst to do this boring job.

So, I thought: how could we provide a solution for traceability between business processes and UIs? And better still: how could we activate the concern on user interaction?

Using a model-driven strategy, the use of an intermediate model can serve two main purposes: First, serve as a traceability link between business process models and UI models. Second, enable system analysts and UI designers to discuss about user interaction before getting into prototyping.

Could the time spent on updating long spreadsheets be, in any way, more useful than the time devoted for user interaction analysis?