Categorizing communicability evaluation breakdowns in groupware applications

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.