ManasTool: uma ferramenta computacional para apoio ao projeto da comunicação entre usuários em sistemas colaborativos

Abstract

The use of the Internet is growing in exponential proportion, and following this tendency, the use of the collaborative systems (i.e. systems that allows people to interact with each other) is also increasing. Since the eighties, researchers have pointed out the importance of the social impact that collaborative systems have over their users. However, few proposals have been made to take into account this impact during design and evaluation stages. Within this context, Manas has been proposed as a model that focuses on the social impact the communicative model of a collaborative system has over its users. Manas is grounded on the Semiotic Engineering of HCI and can be used in the design and evaluation of such a system. However, Manas has been proposed recently and thus still requires further evaluation. For this reason, in this work, two evaluations of Manas are conducted and their results show that Manas is able to identify relevant social impact problems. Moreover, based on indicators generated by the evaluation, we propose changes on Manas language (L-ComUSU) to increase its expressivity and allow its use on systems evaluation stage, that is when the system is already built. As the main goal of this work, we propose a tool, called ManasTool, that instanciates Manas architecture model, allowing the designer/evaluator to build the user-system-user communication model through a graphical user interface. ManasTool also facilitates the analysis and evalution of the potential social impact problems generated by Manas. Finally, a case study is conducted as an initial evaluation of ManasTool, generating positive indicators of its use.