Anais do IHC'2001 - Departamento de Informática e Estatística - UFSC

Anais do IHC’2001 - IV Workshop sobre Fatores Humanos em Sistemas Computacionais 39
proposed that a conversation should follow a general principle called the Cooperative
Principle (CP):
“Make your conversational contribution such as is required,
at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or
direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.”
(Grice, 1975:45)
This principle is supported by a number of conversational conventions, or maxims:
Maxim of Quantity: Make your contribution as informative
as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Do
not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Maxim of Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false.
Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
Maxim of Relation: Be relevant.
Maxim of Manner: Be perspicuous. Avoid obscurity of
expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary
prolixity). Be orderly.
In addition, Grice proposes that a maxim such as “Be polite” is also normally observed.
In the next section, we present a case study in which we analyze multiple
environments for a single set of services, in view of the aforementioned interaction model
and pragmatic principles.
4. Banking Environments: A Case Study
In our case study, we chose the application of a banking system, due to its immediate
availability in multiple environments: phone banking, ATM, and web banking. The task
was to check the balance of one of his checking accounts. During the test, we took notes
about how the user carried out the interaction, specified it in the LECI language, and made
some brief discourse analysis of the conversation that was exchanged between user and
system. Our goal was twofold: first, we wanted to check if LECI could be used to specify
an application’s interaction possibilities at a high level of abstraction (independently of the
environment), that would later be specialized or instantiated according to the environment.
Second, we wanted to investigate if a discourse analysis could complement the analysis
based on the LECI language.
4.1 Phone System
Figure 1 illustrates the interaction that took place in the phone-banking system, and the
corresponding LECI specification (to the right):