User interfaces often only support one way to do a task when the physical interface or the requirements of the task would permit other ways. In contrast, a user interface that supports multiple approaches is permissive. This paper argues that permissive user interfaces are easier to use — and even when they are not applicable for particular applications, considering permissiveness is a producti...

Ambient intelligent systems are context aware by perceiving and reasoning about their environment, they perceive the needs of their users and proactively respond to these needs by being context sensitive. Users do not interact with these systems by traditional means only, but also through behavioural interfaces. This combination of mixed initiative systems and unconventional interfaces puts str...

During the academic year 1996/97 the authors were commissioned by their institution to produce an automated timetabling system for use by all departments within the Faculty of Science. The system had to cater for the varying requirements of all the departments, be easy to use, robust, expandable, and timetable 100% of events fully automatically within a reasonable time. The timetables produced ...

One aspect that has received little attention in COTS selection is what we call conceptual fit, which we evaluate in terms of the existing misfits. We define the notion of conceptual misfit and we present an approach that determines the conceptual misfits between the user requirements and a set of candidate systems. The approach consists in defining a superschema, the mapping of the conceptual ...

IXSQL, an extension to SQL, is proposed for the management of interval data. IXSQL is syntactically and semantically upwards consistent with SQL2. Its specification has been based both on theoretical results and actual user requirements for the management of temporal data, a special case of interval data. Design decisions and implementation issues are also discussed.

Placeholders in physical documents provide critical support for the human reader in relocating material and their place in the text. However, the equivalent tools in digital documents have long been identified as suffering from unintuitive interactions and low rates of use. This paper evaluates the current bookmarking technologies found in digital document readers, and identifies a number of sp...

This paper describes a methodology for the participatory design of services in the public sector. The stakeholders participating in the design include three major players, the public which uses the service, the government body which sponsors and finances the service, and the organization (government or third party) that delivers the service. We propose a method for a) gathering the – possibly c...

One way of contributing to a demonstration that a medical device is acceptably safe is to show that the device satisfies a set of requirements known to mitigate hazards. This paper describes experience using formal techniques to model an IV infusion device and to prove that the modelled device captures a set of requirements. The requirements chosen for the study are based on a draft proposal de...

The concept of adaptive user interfaces is a promising solution for providing users with a wide range of individual needs with accessible technology. Developers only have to implement one generic solution to offer a multitude of individually optimised concrete user interfaces. Whereas a lot of technical functionalities and characteristics of adaptive user interfaces are already solved, there is...

This paper presents the methodology and research results on identification of potential users of the ESABALT system, which is targeted towards improving the situational awareness in the Baltic Sea region. We describe the technique of analysing the stakeholders involved in maritime sector processes, especially in maritime transport processes, while also taking into account their differen...