Semiotic engineering was originally proposed as a semiotic approach to designing user interface
languages. Over the years with research done at the Department of Informatics of the
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro it evolved into a semiotic theory of
human-computer interaction (HCI). It views HCI as computer-mediated communication between
designers and users at interaction time. The system speaks for its designers in various types
of conversations specified at design time. These conversations communicate the designers'
understanding of who the users are what they know the users want or need to do in which
preferred ways and why. The designers' message to users includes even the interactive language
in which users will have to communicate back with the system in order to achieve their specific
goals. Hence the process is in fact one of communication about communication or
metacommunication. Semiotic engineering has two methods to evaluate the quality of
metacommunication in HCI: the semiotic inspection method (SIM) and the communicability
evaluation method (CEM). Up to now they have been mainly used and discussed in technical
contexts focusing on how to detect problems and how to improve the metacommunication of
specific systems. In this book Clarisse de Souza and Carla Leitão discuss how SIM and CEM
which are both qualitative methods can also be used in scientific contexts to generate new
knowledge about HCI. The discussion goes into deep considerations about scientific methodology
calling the reader's attention to the essence of qualitative methods in research and the kinds
of results they can produce. To illustrate their points the authors present an extensive case
study with a free open-source digital audio editor called Audacity. They show how the results
obtained with a triangulation of SIM and CEM point at new research avenues not only for
semiotic engineering and HCI but also for other areas of computer science such as
softwareengineering and programming. Table of Contents: Introduction Essence of Semiotic
Engineering Semiotic Engineering Methods Case Study with Audacity Lessons Learned with
Semiotic Engineering Methods The Near Future of Semiotic Engineering
