Feedback is commonly used to explain what happened in an interface. What if questions, on the other hand, remain mostly unanswered. In this paper, we present the concept of enhanced widgets capable of visualizing their future state, which helps users to understand what will happen without committing to an action. We describe two approaches to extend GUI toolkits to support widget-level feedforward, and illustrate the usefulness of widget-level feedforward in a standardized interface to control the weather radar in commercial aircraft. In our evaluation, we found that users require less clicks to achieve tasks and are more confident about their actions when feedforward information was available. These findings suggest that widget-level feedforward is highly suitable in applications the user is unfamiliar with, or when high confidence is desirable.

Feedback and feedforward are two fundamental mechanisms that supports users' activities while interacting with computing devices. While feedback can be easily solved by providing information to the users following the triggering of an action, feedforward is much more complex as it must provide information before an action is performed. Fortunettes is a generic mechanism providing a systematic way of designing feedforward addressing both action and presentation problems. Including a feedforward mechanism significantly increases the complexity of the interactive application hardening developers' tasks to detect and correct defects. This paper proposes the use of an existing formal notation for describing the behavior of interactive applications and how to exploit that formal model to extend the behavior to offer feedforward. We use a small login example to demonstrate the process and the results.

We present key results of SCATE (Smart Computer-Aided Translation Environment). The project investigated algorithms, user interfaces and methods that can contribute to the development of more efficient tools for translation work.

Keeping track of design processes is a cumbersome task due to the apparently unconstrained and unstructured nature of creative work. Traceability is fundamental to revisit and reflect on the design narratives that describe artefact evolution. In this paper, we aim to identify what characteristics are necessary to facilitate traceability of creative design processes. For this end, we use a functional prototype to connect artefacts, design rationale, and decisions in a shared workspace. We evaluated this prototype for 15 weeks with six pairs of students engaged in a user-centered design project. Our findings show that having a lean repository of artefacts annotated with design rationale can facilitate tracking progress in different phases of the process. We found that creating a record of the participants' design work is useful to reflect on and for team agreement, ensure consistency of evolving artefacts, and help in planning future steps in the design project.

Translation environments offer various translation aids to support professional translators. However, translation aids typically provide only limited justification for the translation suggestions they propose. In this paper we present Intellingo, a translation environment that explores intelligibility for translation aids, to enable more sensible usage of translation suggestions. We performed a comparative study between an intelligible version and a non-intelligible version of Intellingo. The results show that although adding intelligibility does not necessarily result in significant changes to the user experience, translators can better assess translation suggestions without a negative impact on their performance. Intelligibility is preferred by translators when the additional information it conveys benefits the translation process and when this information is not part of the translator's readily available knowledge.

Design artefacts are vital to communicate design outcomes, both in remote and co-located settings. However, it is unclear how artefacts are used to mediate interactions between designers and stakeholders of the design process. The purpose of this paper is exploring how professional design teams use artefacts to guide and capture discussions involving multidisciplinary stakeholders while they work in a co-located setting. An earlier draft of this paper was paper published in the Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics (ECCE 2017). This work adds substantial clarification of the methodology followed, further details and photographs of the case studies, and an extended discussion about our findings and their relevance for designing interactive systems. We report the observations of six design meetings in three different projects, involving professional design teams that follow a user-centered design approach. Meetings with stakeholders are instrumental for design projects. However, design teams face the challenge of synthesizing large amounts of information, often in a limited time, and with minimal common ground between meeting attendees. We found that all the observed design meetings had a similar structure consisting of a series of particular phases, in which design activities were organized around artefacts. These artefacts were used as input to disseminate and gather feedback of previous design outcomes, or as output to collect and process a variety of perspectives. We discuss the challenges faced by design teams during design meetings, and propose three design directions for interactive systems to coordinate design meetings revolving around artefacts.

Design meetings with multidisciplinary stakeholders are instrumental for design projects. However, design teams face the challenges of synthetizing large amounts of information, often in a limited time, and with minimal common ground. We investigate these challenges through in-the-wild observations of six design meetings in three different projects, with professional design teams that follow a user-centered design methodology. We found that all the observed design meetings had a similar structure consisting of particular phases, in which design activities were organized around artefacts. These artefacts were used as input to disseminate and gather feedback of previous design outcomes, or as output to collect and process a variety of perspectives. From these findings, we synthetize practical guidelines to optimize artefact-based interactions during design meetings.

In the design process, designers make a wide variety of decisions that are essential to transform a design from a conceptual idea into a concrete solution. Recording and tracking design decisions, a first step to capturing the rationale of the design process, are tasks that until now are considered as cumbersome and too constraining. We used a holistic approach to design, deploy, and verify decision cards; a low threshold tool to capture, externalize, and contextualize design decisions during early stages of the design process. We evaluated the usefulness and validity of decision cards with both novice and expert designers. Our exploration results in valuable insights into how such decision cards are used, into the type of information that practitioners document as design decisions, and highlight the properties that make a recorded decision useful for supporting awareness and traceability on the design process.