Investigating the Applicability of the Semiotic Inspection Method to Collaborative Systems

Evaluating collaborative systems is still an open issue being investigated by the HCI and CSCW communities. One of the various relevant aspects to be considered in the evaluation is the quality of the interaction. In that direction there have been proposed methods that adapt or extend consolidated single-user usability evaluation methods. However, these methods have not yet been widely used and consolidated. In this paper we investigate the applicability of an inspection method based on the Semiotic Engineering theory for HCI - the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM) - to collaborative systems. One of the motivations of this investigation is that, in theory the method does not require adaptations to be applied to collaborative systems. The results confirm that the method can be directly applied to collaborative systems, identifying relevant interaction problems.