de Araujo, A.C.I.C. (2008) Apoio ao design e à interpretação de modelos de interação humano-computador representados em MoLIC. M.Sc. Diss. Port. Presentation: 26/03/08. 293 p. Advisor: Simone Diniz Junqueira Barbosa.
Abstract: Personal computer users frequently view an interactive computacional system as the user interface itself. Therefore, it's desirable that such interface be developed in a way they can understand what the system is for, what it allows their users to do and in which way, for whom it's made etc. Based on Semiotic Engineering, which is the theoretical foundation of this work, such isues are being conveyed to the users in a metamessage from the designer, communicated by its user interface, through conversations between the user and the designer - this one through his deputy at interaction time, the designer's deputy. Before the concrete user interface is developed, Semiotic Engineering proposes to model the user-system interaction as a dialogue. In this stage, the designer models all the possible ways he anticipates that the users will be able to accomplish their goals. For this stage, a modeling language called MoLIC (Modeling Language for Interaction as Conversation) was created in 2003 to represent the interaction as the possible conversations between the user and the designer. Although it has been proposed as an epistemic tool, until now MoLIC had not its epistemic features explored explicitly. This work aims to explore the epistemic value of MoLIC, supporting the designer's reflection through a set of questions that he moght ask for himself about the interaction representation, in order to accomplish two goals. The first one is to support the (re)design activity itself, by making explicit the consequences of the design decisions represented in MoLIC. The second one is to support the interpretation of the human-computer interaction represented in MoLIC, so that the designer or any other reader would be able to understand and explain MoLIC diagrams based on the conversation metaphor.
