Person:

Potts, Colin

Permanent Link

https://hdl.handle.net/1853/71597

Associated Organization(s)

Organizational Unit

School of Interactive Computing

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 11

Improving requirements completeness through inquiry-based goal refinement

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1999) Potts, Colin
Coordination in Multi-Organization Creative Design Projects

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1998) Eastman, Charles M. ; Hsi, Idris ; Potts, Colin

We are interested in the coordination of design and planning decisions in large, multi-organizational projects and their implications for technology support. These projects are undertaken by goal-driven "virtual organizations", involving companies of different sizes, professional traditions, cultures, as well as geographic location. We have observed several months of planning and review meetings in a multi-national architectural project and have gathered volumes of design and planning documentation in the form of memoranda, faxes, project plans and design drawings. From our observations, we outline the requirements and possible features of useful coordination support.
Observer Mercury Project

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1998) Potts, Colin
Towards a Framework for Hypermedia Scenarios

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1998) Hobbs, Reginald L. (Reginald Lionel) ; Potts, Colin

Scenarios have been used in many disciplines, such as software engineering, cognitive science, and HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) to aid in decision making, comprehension, design, and training. Scenarios are instances of behavior of the systems, or "stories" about how the system will or should look. These scenarios are used largely as points of discussion in each of these cases. Building new scenarios or analyzing existing scenarios orient the discussion in collaborative activities and increase understanding in single user tasks. How can a scenario structure be defined that will support the widest range of discussion/comprehension activities and remain content- and access-independent? Scenarios can be structured as a document. In some ways, it is similar to a screenplay document from the film industry. The use of a markup language will allow scenario documents to take advantage of hypermedia representations of the components. Building appropriate tools to interpret the Scenario Markup Language (SCML) will support the creation of different representations of scenarios (such as storyboards, audiovisual segments, narratives, etc.) from the same data. Interactions between SCML and tool functionality will also support scenario authoring, dependency analysis, and structured walkthroughs.
Systematic design of Intranet services

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1998) Potts, Colin
Developing Voice-only Applications in the Absence of Speech Recognition Technology

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1997) Dey, Anind K. ; Catledge, Lara D. ; Abowd, Gregory D. ; Potts, Colin

In this paper, we describe an information access system with a voice-only interface. We outline a design process for generating guidelines for voice-only interaction in the absence of adequate speech recognition technology. Our usability studies make use of a "Wizard of Oz" scheme to replace the missing core technology.
Distributed Laboratories: A Research Proposal

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1996) Schwan, Karsten ; Ahamad, Mustaque ; Hudson, Scott E. ; Limb, J. O. (John O.) ; Ammar, Mostafa H. ; Ezquerra, Norberto F. ; Mukherjee, Amarnath ; Potts, Colin ; Ramachandran, Umakishore ; Zegura, Ellen W. ; Fujimoto, Richard M.

The continuing merger of computer and communication technologies is leading to a new computing/communications infrastructure of unprecedented magnitude, enabling new applications with broad economic and social impact. Yet, such applications pose major challenges to researchers in Computer Science and in application domains. The topic of the proposed research program is the realization of Distributed Laboratories, where individuals can interact with each other, and more importantly, with powerful, distributed computational tools as readily as if all were located in a single site. Our intent is to permit scientists, engineers, and managers at geographically distinct locations (including individuals 'tele-commuting' from home) to combine their expertise in solving shared problems, by allowing them to simultaneously view, interact with, and steer sophisticated computations executing on high performance distributed computing platforms.
Collaboration during Conceptual Design

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1995) Catledge, Lara D. ; Potts, Colin

Conceptual design involves requirements analysis, functional specification, and architectural design. It remains informal and poorly understood. We studied the conceptual design activities of a representative industrial software project, Centauri, for three months with follow-up observations and discussions over the following six months. Our goal was to understand how patterns of collaboration and communication in project teams affect the convergence of the project on a common vision and a documented specification. In this paper, we present our research methodology, our findings, and their implications for process and tool support. The following observations stand out. First, convergence on a common system vision was painfully slow. The major impediment to faster progress was the difficulty that the project team had in making critical allocation and interface design decisions. Second, Centauri project members repeatedly raised certain issues and failed to reach closure on key problems. Finally, we observed a persistent tension between the desire on behalf of nearly all project members to follow a proceduralized development process and the urgency of delivering a working product.
Towards Integrating Rationalistic and Ecological Design Methods for Interactive Systems

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1995) Hsi, Idris ; Potts, Colin

Interactive systems design based on rationalistic methods can benefit from the integration of ecological methods that gather information about the user and the task environment. In this paper, we begin to discuss how such an integration of methods can be brought about and what benefits can be derived from it. Using meeting scheduling as an example, we show how workplace data gathering, in the form of user interviews, can significantly alter the specification of a collaborative interactive system. Our discussion of rationalistic methods is restricted to goal refinement approaches, and we discuss a series of design issues that are most pertinent in this approach, specifically: agency and responsibility, obstacle identification, obstacle avoidance and recovery, volume, frequency and repetitiveness issues, generic scenarios and critical incidents, artifact analysis, and deliberate fuzziness. However, we conclude by outlining how ecological methods could be integrated similarly with other rationalistic methods.
Inquiry-Based Scenario Analysis of System Requirements

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 1994) Potts, Colin ; Takahashi, Kenji ; Antón, Annie

The Inquiry Cycle is a formal structure for describing and supporting discussions about system requirements. It divides requirements analysis into three intertwined processes: proposing or writing requirements, challenging or discussing them, and refining or improving them. In this paper, we present an extended example (a meeting scheduler) of the Inquiry Cycle in operation, categorize the types of requirements discussion that occur in practice, and suggest some heuristics for analyzing requirements. We also explain how concrete scenarios improve analysis.