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1 Introduction

The biodiversity is one of the main Brazilian concerns and means the variety of all kind of alive organisms such as animals, microorganisms and plants in the terrestrial, marine and aquatic ecosystems. The biodiversity has a really meaningful task in order to provide food, medicines and feedstock beside to serve environmental services such as pollination, carbon storage and others task some time not visible for human begins [7].

Performing biodiversity monitoring activities can be considered as a meaningful activity to ensure a great worldwide environment and an appropriate balance among economy tasks, industries and the preservation of biodiversity patrimony. The knowledge and information management about the use, preservation and state of nature is other government needs that encourage a group of systematic activities in order to monitoring the biodiversity [7].

Brazil has one of the most important biodiversity areas considering the scale and the amount of species that live in the several Brazilian forests. Brazilian government partnership with international entities, universities and other organizations provide a group of activities that aim to monitor the biodiversity in preserved areas as known as Conservation Units.

A Biodiversity Monitoring Program proposed by Brazilian Ministry of Environment aims to use computational resources such as Information System to collect, process, store, maintain and publish meaningful information about biodiversity. The project main resource is composed by a group of software that is proposed to work as the basis of this process, i.e., in the Conservation Unit supporting the data gathering, visualization, standardization, updating and recuperating data about the monitoring process. A second software tool aims to support management and executive decisions providing information based on a monitoring data mining. Also, a popular tool to be used by every people whose want to know about biodiversity was proposed.

Before starting this system development, the developers and stakeholders identified some issues that should be solved. One of the concerns related to this project was about users and software interaction features in the Conservation Units since they should perform an important task to support all the biodiversity monitoring process and provide data for analysis about Brazilian Biodiversity conservation. Besides the interaction features, we also concerned about external items that could interfere the data gathering process such as: (1) Internet Service: Some Conservation Units are located far from cities and may not provide internet service and this can affect the data gathering process; (2) External Activities features: it is necessary to understand how the data gathering should work in order to provide interface and interaction resources to ensure an appropriate computational process; and (3) Extra users tools: understand whether other activities (related or not to the monitoring program) could interfere in the use of the system and so, adapt the interface to solve or support it.

Based on these requirements doubts and aiming to provide the best interface and interaction environment to support the data gathering process, we proposed three research questions:

  • Who are the users that work in the Conservation Units and what are their features?

  • How should be the interface and the interaction process in the Conservation Unit software to support the data input?

  • How is the hardware infrastructure?

This research was performed in two stages: (1) composed by three in loco visits to know and understand the Conservation Unit working process; (2) a survey that was answered by several Conservation Units.

The survey results were used to guide the Biodiversity Information System Human Computer Interaction (HCI) development, mainly, the collect data software. Also, the data were used to improve the Conservation Unit’s information management.

The next section presents the bibliographic review used in this work.

2 Bibliographic Review

This section presents the bibliographic review about subjects that are meaningful for this research.

2.1 User Profile

Users are the most important concern of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) development team. The variety of needs, preferences, knowledge, physical and mental features from one person to another can interfere in software HCI capacity, making a tool easy, difficult or impossible to be used. For example, features as vision, hearing, touch and other can define a pleasurable interaction to one user and a not so good for another user [1].

The environment, tasks, relationship and age are features that must be observed by the designer before creating a software HCI. For example, if a user will use software for many hours per day, the system must have a interface with light colors [1, 5, 6].

Thus, by understanding the user’s features, their environment, limits and knowledge, the design is more likely to achieve a correct interaction strategy that may allow the users to perform their task with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction, i.e., the software will present a great level of usability [6].

2.2 Interviews and Surveys

There are several techniques to support the identification of users’ profiles and tasks [1, 6]. Two widely used techniques are: Interviews and Surveys.

The interviews are dialogs established between user and interviewer (can be the designer) and the interviewer uses questions created previously in order to obtain information about a subject. Two interviews approaches can be used: Structured or semi-structured [1].

The structured interview is composed by questions created previously and the interviewer must only use these questions and follow a specific guide to ask and manage the answers. The interviewer cannot change the interview guide and all the answers are limited to specific options proposed [1, 6].

The semi-structured interview is similar to the structured interview, but the interviewer can use no previously prepared questions or can guide the interview to a not planned strategy. Whether the user answers a question and this answer provides some relevant data, the interviewer can use this data to create new questions or to establish a more complex dialog and so, collected more data about the user [1].

No structured interviews can also be used when it is necessary to minimize the design pre concepts or when the designer do not have any information about the users, context or environment that the software will be used.

The interviews are techniques that the interviewer is close to the user, usually, face to face. However, not always this situation is allowed due to the reason that sometime it is necessary to interview a great number of people that are not accessible or the users are far from the interviewer. When this situation happens, it is necessary to use the survey technique.

The surveys are an optimized way to collect data from a great amount of users/participants or from participants that are not geographically close to each other [1]. Preparing a survey is not a trivial and/or easy task because it is necessary to analyze, design and test the survey. A survey validation, with other professionals such as administrators, can improve the quality of the survey [1]. An appropriate survey takes time to be created and should be:

  • Comprehensive;

  • Unequivocal;

  • Collect relevant data to the evaluation context;

  • Easy to analyze.

The terms to be used should be carefully chosen in order to allow the participant to understand the questions and provide relevant answers. Closed and Open questions can be used [1, 5, 6]. Closed questions contain specific answers where the user should choose one or more answers. Open questions allow the user to write any text about the answer.

The data analysis is a complex task that requires availability and attention from the analysts. Open questions require more effort to be analyzed since there is no default in the answers guide in order to identify standards or relevant data. Considering Closed questions, the analysis can be easier due to the reason that each answer has a scare or scale indicating the confidence level of answers. However, process all the possible answers combination to create relevant information is also a complex and extensive task.

The next section presents the activities performed during the visits (mainly interviews with the users) and the survey application.

3 Data Collect Process

This section presents the data collect process that is composed by the following stages:

  • Visiting the Conservation Units and Interviews;

  • Survey preparation; and

  • Survey Application.

3.1 Visit to Conservation Units and Interviews

The survey preparation was preceded by three in loco visits performed in three different Conservation Units. The visits were performed to support the requirements and users profile gathering in real conditions of work. Also, data about hardware and software infrastructure, business process and boundaries were also registered.

These three Conservation Units, controlled by Brazilian Environment Ministry, were chosen: (1) Rio de Janeiro State; (2) Mato Grosso do Sul State; (3) Amazonas State.

The Conservation Units chosen are located far from each other and it were selected based on their particular aspects such as: ease of access, number of staff, technology services available, distance from the forest where the monitoring happens, biome. Figure 1 presents the Brazilian Map with the visited Conservation Unit locations. The Conservation Unit 01 was considered the best unit since its infrastructure was really good, Unit 02 presented middle level because it did not have the same infrastructure but was acceptable and was the common scenario presented in most Conservation Units in Brazil. Unit 03 was considered as a critical scenario due to the distance from cities and the difficult with services such as Internet, hardware equipments, transport and staff.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Brazilian Map and Conservation Units location

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For each visit we used the following techniques to achieve specific goals: The Ethnography technique [1] was used to understand the administrative and operational process, to learn about daily activities and their impacts on the monitoring program and consequently on the software. Besides ethnography, a semi structured interview [1] was used to understand details about the biodiversity monitoring process in each unit. The interviews also supported the gathering of data about technology resources and the knowledge, expectation and interest of the staff about the biodiversity monitoring.

During the visits, the researchers also verified and tested previous releases of the survey in order to support the deployment of the final version that should be applied to the selected units. Three versions (one per unit visited) were analyzed to improve the next survey releases. So, the improvements were applied considering the questions and suggestions proposed by previous answers during the discussions of the issues that were identified by the researchers and considered meaningful to the software/HCI development process.

After the visits and the three previous survey releases, we established the final release that was send to the units and a process to select a group of participants was also started by stakeholders.

In the next section we present the survey preparation and deployment.

3.2 Survey Deployment

This section presents the participant selection process, the survey deployment process and the survey final release structure.

Selection of Survey Participants.

The process to select the participants was performed by the project sponsors due to the reason that they knew all the users that could really contribute to the project. Seventeen Conservation Units were chosen to answer the survey and, for each unit, two or three future software users participated. The users presented different qualifications and performed different tasks leading to a condition to provide more consistent data based on several views. The unit’s employees were advised about the research and oriented to answer the survey correctly.

All the selected units were located in different areas such as South, North and Coast of Brazil assuring that cultural differences and qualifications were assured in the development of the HCIs. The surveys were answered by environmental analysts and units managers.

Survey Deployment.

The survey was created using a tool named Lime SurveyFootnote 1. The Lime Survey is an open source tool that allows creating, applying and managing surveys. Also, this tool provides advanced resource to application and to data analysis. The survey final release had fifty questions divided in five groups:

Personal Profile: Questions related to personal data such as age, education and previous knowledge about basic skills of using the computer. This group of questions aimed to identify personal issues about the future users that could interfere in the software and also to provide data to the development team identify the features of future users and try to adequate the software and its HCIs to specific characteristics. Questions such as: “Does the software need to have resources to conduct lay people or we can provide the basic computing resources considering that all the users had basic computing knowledge?” is an example.

Technical Profile: Questions related to the use, preferences, needs and restrictions considering the daily use of the software. This group was created aimed to identify the user interfaces requirements. All the questions guided to issues that must be a concern to the HCI development team. To support the questions and improve the results, we required the participants to indicate examples of software and web sites that they know and consider the interaction as good or bad.

The technical profile survey also provided questions about new technologies that the development team intended to use. The questions were about: mobile technologies; touch technologies; use of mobile in the external areas; and new interfaces approaches. The participants answered with really nice suggestions about HCI requirements and provide a great discussion about the use of mobile technology that was an approach desired by the stakeholders. Unfortunately the participants/users did not presented good perspectives about the use of this resource.

Monitoring Profile: Questions related to the knowledge about biodiversity monitoring protocol and how the software could support the monitoring process. This was the smaller group of questions because there were provided questions that just aimed to know about the participants monitoring knowledge. Thus, questions such as: “what is the monitoring protocol?”; “how is performed the monitoring protocol?” were applied.

Information Management: Questions related to the information management of the unit and about the tools that supported this management. One of the main stockholders’ concern was related to the management of biodiversity data and correct support to the decisions that should be taken. Thus, questions about which the users considered important to support the biodiversity information management and how biodiversity information could be applied in daily work were presented. The questions had content such as: suggestions to data visualization; opinions about system that were used daily; data/information considered relevant; forms of data use and delivery.

Infrastructure: One of the main concerns of the development team was the information technology infrastructure due to the reason that some stakeholders notified the team that some units had precarious computers and Internet Service and this limitations could lead to software failure. Considering this, the questions proposed about the computer configuration, Internet power, computers amount, quality of hardware and hard disk capacity. In the survey there was a question that asked to the participant to input data about support service (some units pay for external hardware support).

These five groups composed the survey and each group was presented in a different webpage previously announced by a “welcome page”.

Survey Apply.

The survey was applied using the Lime Survey tool. A web link was sent to the participants by the stakeholders and the deadline for the participants to answer the survey was 15 days.

After the surveys were responded, the data were stored in the administration system in the Lime Survey. Some participants reported problems to answer, but they were just related to Internet service.

4 Results

The visits, interviews and surveys were proposed in order to provide data to support functional and non-functions biodiversity information system requirements quality and identify users’ profile. In this paper, we are just considering the data analysis to support the HCI development and the data provided by final survey release.

The data analysis was performed based on two approaches: Specific Groups Analysis; and General Analysis. The results are presented both in qualitative and quantitative approach due to the reason that some the questions were not created qualitative or quantitative oriented.

4.1 Individually Groups Analysis

For each group of questions we performed an individual data analysis. This section presents the analysis performed by group individually.

Personal Profile Analysis.

The personal profile analysis presented that the participants are typically computer users and they would have no difficulty to use software. The answers presented that all the users has, at least, the undergraduate education and most of them are master degree and/or PHD.

The use of software is common for business and personal tasks for 100 % of the participants. Also, the users were familiar to mobile devices and 40 % answer that learned informatics using and learning alone, and 60 % learned in courses or other people teaching.

These questions presented that there is no restrictions in the development of a new tool to be used by the participants considering that the lack of knowledge of basic computing would not interfere in the activities and, also, do not require special training or preparation.

Another important issue analyzed was the period of daily use of computers by the users. All the participants answered that they use the computer at least 8 h by day. This information leads to a HCI requirement focused on an easy and clear interface and interaction that should not affected or tire the users. Also, considering that all the participants work with computer several hours per day, it means that they could had several tasks to be performed and so, new activities should not create stress or delays for monitoring or existing activities.

Thus, as a final personal profile created based on presented information, we established that users may:

  • Have basic computing Knowledge;

  • Have good and easy learning ability;

  • Have knowledge about new technologies; and

  • Work many hours by day with computer for business activities.

Technical Profile Analysis.

The technical survey was analyzed in order to identify the HCI features desired by users. We aimed to identify whether the user preferred typical interface, more interactive interface or new HCI approaches (few used until now). This survey stage was considered the most important for HCI requirements since it should provide data to support the HCI software development.

For this research we assumed typical interfaces with a default layout usually applied to Microsoft Windows or Linux, Desktop or Web approaches. A more interactive interface refers to a software interaction with more interactive components, bigger buttons and labels, movements on the components, highlights and other issue that provide a more dynamic interaction. As new HCI approach we assumed new concepts such as Natural User Interface [8] or Internet of Things [9].

The first profile group was composed by three groups of questions: (1) Type of interface; (2) Knowledge about interaction components; (3) Users’ behavior in the use of HCI systems.

The type of interface questions were composed by three questions such as: preferences about colors and contrast; Size and shape of objects on the screen; and a open question that required to be filled about the user opinion about a perfect interface. This question also accepted suggestions about software to be used as prototype or to exemplify user answer.

The results presented that 90 % of the participants clearly preferred the traditional interface layout with simple text labels and formats; also they prefer the interface with a background light color and dark labels and fonts. The use of highlights components or nonstandard objects was not accepted for 88 % of the participants due to the reason that different components could make them do not interact properly with the systems. The open question presented a common list of users’ suggestion that contained:

  • Easy to use;

  • Intuitive;

  • Support use activities with auto complete, suggestions and errors handling; and

  • The software should just contain the enough items to accomplish the tasks.

The last suggestion was justified with the fact that actual software presents many components, resources and interfaces that are not used, but interfere in the daily tasks.

The second profile group was composed by five questions related to user experience and aimed to collect data about: Interaction devices preferences, information distributions on the screen; and interaction facilities preferences.

The questions related to devices preferences presented that the users did not desired new components such as touch screen or voice recognition. 90 % presented that they never used these devices and 10 % presented that use rarely but did not agree with the use in the new software. The use of traditional keyboard and mouse was the answer of 100 % of the participants. The questions related to the information distribution presented the result of 100 % of participants that preferred an interface with the components and interaction distributed/grouped by context. This feature ensured that the users found and used the software components easily.

A security group with two questions was applied and these questions asked about the users readability, i.e., “do the users read the messages presented by the software”. This question was applied because the developers should know the level of security and error prevention that should be necessary. The results presented that the developers are concerned about security issues on the interface due to the reason that 70 % of the participants answered that they do not read messages provided by computer and 20 % read the messages quickly and do not pay attention to the message content. Just 10 % answered that they read carefully the messages. Thus, we assumed that a complex security interaction approach should be deployed in order to avoid that the users perform incorrect activities or take decisions based on a advertisement that were not read by the user. Confirmation messages and text confirmations were used to support these activities. Figure 2 present an advertise interface example. The text is in Brazilian Portuguese.

Fig. 2.
figure 2

Advertise interface example

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All the questions should present the focus on a non-destructive activity to avoid the wrong call of a function, i.e., case the user desired to execute an activity, he/she must move the mouse or input some text by the keyboard to select the action. We proposed this approach because we considered that making a complex action using mouse or keyboard, they could read the message and take the decision about the tasks before perform any action.

Lastly, we present a question about the user of Wizard Standard to support the interaction. Wizard Standard is an interaction feature usually known as “Next, Next, Previous”, i.e., all the process is based on a sequence of interface where the user go a specific next screen or return to a specific previous. There is no way to go to another screen since it does not be the sequence of the process. All the participants answered that known this standard and agree with the applying in the projects.

Thus, considering the results presented by the technical survey, the development team could analyze technical interface issues in order to provide a HCI final product that really meets the user’s needs and allows them to perform the biodiversity monitoring task appropriated and safe.

The next section presents the Monitoring Protocol data analysis.

Information Management Data Analysis.

As meaningful data for HCI development we considered some answers related to the use of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Excel to accomplish most tasks and due to this reason, the users are really familiar with these tools.

Thus, we identified a users’ desired that future software should present a resource to import/transform Excel data in software data besides create interfaces similar to Excel could improve and facilitate user experience.

Infrastructure Information Data.

The infrastructure survey aimed to gathered data about hardware and network capacity. For HCI development this group of questions provided data in order to support the development of HCI to work with traditional computers because the Conservation Units did not have supercomputers or computer with high performance, so any resource that required computers with more power could not work correctly.

4.2 General Analysis

Considering the results of the surveys presents in the previous section and considering a project to support the biodiversity monitoring we proposed the HCI requirements present at Table 1. The requirements are classified as:

Table 1. HCI requirements proposed
Full size table

In the next section we present the conclusions.

5 Conclusions

This paper presented a survey performed in Conservation Units in Brazil in order to collect data to support the development of a software to support the biodiversity monitoring system. This paper focused on the collect and analysis of data related to users’ profile and HCI requirements.

The results were used in the development and supported the HCI project. These results were used to support the design decisions aiming to present an interface that can be used by the users in the best strategy to achieve theirs goals with efficacy and efficiency. Also, some decisions about the software were taken based on the needs the users presented such as a better visualization of the system information and the needs for the biodiversity monitoring activities.