Avaliação da comunicabilidade de sistemas criados por usuários-designers

Abstract

Nowadays, it is essential that a system meets the needs of its users, saving their time. Therefore, the number of people who strive to build their own systems grows every day, and for this type of activity, we call End-User Development (EUD). The Semiotic Engineering uses the term communicability to determine whether the system allows the user understand what the designer wanted to convey when he/she builds a system. In this paper, we evaluate the communicability of systems built by end-users. For this evaluation we have used two methods that also come from Semiotic Engineering, the Semiotics Inspection Method (SIM) and the Communicability Evaluation Method (CEM). Through these methods, we evaluated systems built by volunteers in a tool that helps people with little or no programming knowledge to create conversations, the SideTalk, and also viewing these conversations by other volunteers. With the creation and viewing of the conversations by their volunteers, it was possible to find a series of failures in communication, from the conversations and from the used system as well. The main contribution of this paper is to present the first research in the area of End-User Development (EUD) which uses two methods of Semiotic Engineering, SIM and CEM to evaluate the communicability of non-professional systems.