Categorizing communicability evaluation breakdowns in groupware applications
Raquel Oliveira Prates1,2
1

Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza2
2

Patrícia Seefelder de Assis2,3
3

Department of Computer Science

Department of Informatics

Instituto Politécnico, IPRJ,

State University of Rio de Janeiro, UERJ R. São Francisco Xavier, 524 - 6o. andar 20550-013 Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil raquel@ime.uerj.br

Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro R. Marquês de São Vicente, 225 22453-900 Gávea, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil clarisse@inf.puc-rio.br

State Univeristy of Rio de Janeiro, UERJ Caixa Postal 97282, 28601-970 Nova Friburgo, RJ, Brazil patricia@iprj.uerj.br

Abstract

The communicability evaluation method evolved within the Semiotic Engineering framework and its main goal is to assess how designers communicate to users, through the interface, both their design intent and the interactive principles they have selected for the application. The method consists of 3 steps: tagging, interpretation, semiotic profiling and was originally developed to evaluate how well users get the designer's message from interacting with single-user interfaces. In order to extend the communicability evaluation method to account for groupware applications, we must identify new utterances and problem categories that apply to interacting with and through these applications. In this paper we take the first step in that direction and, based on the results of two case studies, we propose four types of problems that should be added to the original set of HCI problems to characterize interactive breakdowns in groupware applications.
Introduction

We take a Semiotic Engineering approach [de Souza, 1993, de Souza et al., 2000] to HCI. This approach is based on Semiotics (the discipline that studies communication and signification [Eco, 1976]) and views the interface as a oneshot message from designer to users, by which designers tell users (1) who they think the users