This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Design, Specification, and Verification of Interactive Systems, DSVIS 2006, held in Dublin, Ireland in July 2006. The 19 revised full papers presented together with one keynote paper, and two working group reports were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) addresses problems of interaction design: understanding user needs to inform design, delivering novel designs that meet user needs, and evaluating new and existing designs to determine their success in meeting user needs. Qualitative methods have an essential role to play in this enterprise, particularly in understanding user needs and behaviours and evaluating situated use of technology. Qualitative methods allow HCI researchers to ask questions where the answers are more complex and interesting than "true" or "false," and may also be unexpected. In this...

Performing fieldwork in healthcare settings is significantly different from fieldwork in other domains and it presents unique challenges to researchers. Whilst results are reported in research papers, the details of how to actually perform these fieldwork studies are not. This is the first of two volumes designed as a collective graduate guidebook for conducting fieldwork in healthcare. This volume brings together the experiences of established researchers who do fieldwork in clinical and non-clinical settings, focusing on how people interact with healthcare technology, in the form of case...

We live in an "information age," but information is only useful when it is interpreted by people and applied in the context of their goals and activities. The volume of information to which people have access is growing at an incredible rate, vastly outstripping people's ability to assimilate and manage it. In order to design technologies that better support information work, it is necessary to better understand the details of that work. In this lecture, we review the situations (physical, social and temporal) in which people interact with information. We also discuss how people interact with...