This paper presents a catalog of smells in the context of interactive applications. These so-called usability smells are indicators of poor design on an application's user interface, with the potential to hinder not only its usability but also its maintenance and evolution. To eliminate such usability smells we discuss a set of program/usability refactorings. In order to validate the presented usability smells catalog, and the associated refactorings, we present a preliminary empirical study with software developers in the context of a real open source hospital management application. Moreover, a tool that computes graphical user interface behavior models, giving the applications' source code, is used to automatically detect usability smells at the model level.

PVSio-web is a graphical environment for facilitating the design and evaluation of interactive (human-computer) systems. Using PVSio-web, one can generate and evaluate realistic interactive prototypes from formal models. PVSio-web has been successfully used over the last two years for analyzing commercial, safety-critical medical devices. It has been used to create training material for device developers and device users. It has also been used for medical device design, by both formal methods experts and non-technical end users.

This paper presents the latest release of PVSio-web 2.0, which will be part of the next PVS distribution. The new tool architecture is discussed, and the rationale behind its design choices are presented

Integrated clinical environments (ICEs) consist of interoperable medical devices that seamlessly exchange data and commands to create safety interlocks and closed loop controls to improve the quality of care delivered to the patient. Currently at the prototype stage, they promise to form the basis of a new generation of healthcare systems for high acuity patients. Regulators such as the US Food and Drug Administration are promoting the development of tools and techniques for verification and validation of essential safety requirements for ICEs. To date, little research has focused on the certification and assurance of their user interfaces with respect to use errors. In this work, we demonstrate how the PVSio-web prototyping tool can be conveniently used in combination with the communication framework SAPERE to generate realistic ICE systems prototypes from formal models. This approach is particularly suitable for exploring requirements, design, and regulatory issues of usability and safety of the user interfaces of ICE systems. An example ICE system prototype is presented, along with an example analysis demonstrating how the prototype can be used to explore subtle user interface design issues that could lead to usability and safety hazards in clinical scenarios.

Temporal logics targeting real-time systems are traditionally undecidable. Based on a restricted fragment of MTL-∫, we propose a new approach for the runtime verification of hard real-time systems. The novelty of our technique is that it is based on incremental evaluation, allowing us to effectively treat duration properties (which play a crucial role in real-time systems). We describe the two levels of operation of our approach: offline simplification by quantifier removal techniques; and online evaluation of a three-valued interpretation for formulas of our fragment. Our experiments show the applicability of this mechanism as well as the validity of the provided complexity results.

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A hazard is a potential source of physical injury or damage to people or environment, and a hazard analysis is the process of identifying all known and foreseeable hazards and their causes in a system. In this paper, we illustrate our ongoing work in collaboration with the FDA on defining a hazard analysis technique for early identification of the causes in user interface software design of use-related hazards. The technique integrates human cognitive process models and general interaction design principles, and uses a model-based approach for systematic exploration of potential hazards. Preliminary experiments suggest that this hazard analysis technique can substantially improve the identification of use-related hazards at the early stages of software design as compared to standard hazard analysis techniques.