Editorial

The present issue completes the first volume of the English language edition of i-com which has now evolved into the Journal of Interactive Media. The main goals of this transformation have been to increase the visibility of i-com papers at an international level and also to attract contributions from the non-German-speaking community. This decision, taken by GI’s Technical Committee on Human-Computer Interaction is certainly not without risk. The responses from the community, however, have been almost exclusively positive so far, encouraging us to continue this development. The editors and the publisher will be paying close attention to striking a good balance between the international scope of the journal and the needs of the German-speaking community by aiming at a reasonable mixture of papers from the national community and from international authors.

I am happy to say that in this issue – which follows two issues with a more national focus – we have such a mixture in the set of reviewed articles. The first three papers form a thematic focus and are all centered on the subject of model-based engineering of user interfaces. Two of them are revised and extended versions of papers presented at the ACM Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS 2015), held this year in Duisburg. The first paper by Camille Fayollas, Célia Martinie, David Navarre and Philippe Palanque proposes an approach to couple tasks models with instrumented interactive applications and demonstrates the approach in the area of airplane cockpit controls. Following a more formal approach, Raquel Oliveira, Sophie Dupuy-Chessa and Gaëlle Calvary address the issue of using model checking techniques to ensure that an interactive system has required properties. They also apply equivalence checking methods to show that two versions of a user interface, as may be generated by an adaptive, plastic system, are indeed equivalent. Both papers demonstrate their approach in the area of safety-critical systems, indicating that the often deplored effort in applying formal and model-based techniques may particularly pay off in areas where safety takes precedence. The third paper in this thematic focus by Filip Kis and Kristian Bogdan proposes a new method for the model-based generation of interactive systems. By annotating a discourse model of the interactive system, they generate not only a prototype user interface but also some of the functionality of the final system.

The fourth contributed article by Alfredo Ramos, Irene-Angelica Chounta, Tilman Göhnert, and H. Ulrich Hoppe investigates the influence of the visual stability of graph visualizations on users’ search performance. For this purpose, they propose a mathematical model of graph stability and evaluate it in an empirical study. The study yields interesting findings for designing graph visualizations which is an increasingly relevant topic in areas such as social media analytics. The last paper in the research articles section by Nils Backhaus and Manfred Thüring takes a more conceptual perspective and discusses issues related to user trust in cloud computing applications. Finally, in the practitioners’ section, Christina Franze, Lena Funk, Lisa Strasser, Sarah Diefenbach discuss the potential of mobile sports apps and present the results of a survey they performed on this topic.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere thanks to all authors, reviewers and board members who have contributed to making this first volume of the Journal of Interactive Media a success.

Jürgen Ziegler

Editor-in-Chief