IC-Requests: um sistema sensível ao contexto para suporte a solicitações acadêmicas

Abstract

Many academic institutions offer different types of services to the academic community through requests, protocols or requirements. Often, the use of these services involves filling out documents by hand, excessively exchanging emails, or accessing confusing systems, with bad usability and few features. At the Institute of Computing at the Federal University of Bahia (IC-UFBA), students, collegiate coordinators and administrative technicians experience similar problems in the process of academic requests. In this sense, this work studies the modeling and development of a context-sensitive Web system to facilitate the realization and follow-up of academic requests by IC-UFBA students. The system also seeks to assist the collegiate bodies of the Institute of Computing and the administrative staff of the IC-UFBA Graduation Service Center (CEAG-IC) in managing these requests, through an administrative panel with different resources. The use of context-sensitive resources allows the system to intelligently support users in carrying out their tasks, without the need to intervene too much in the system to indicate settings and preferences. The development of the system was carried out in different stages, which involve: an exploratory study with research in the literature, survey of perceptions about the current state of the requests process at IC-UFBA and application of a questionnaire to 52 students; prototyping and modeling context-sensitive features; and system implementation. Finally, the system was evaluated with 16 students in a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) class at UFBA. The analysis of the results indicated that the system has good usability and mitigates some of the main problems reported.