Conciliating XBRL financial reporting and HCI.

Abstract

Even though there are examples of HCI practices related to e-Government, bibliographic research revealed that there is a lack of studies regarding the XBRL financial reports area, which is representative of the G2G e-governance. So, there was a missing link between those areas. In this project awareness step, a questionnaire applied to some volunteers also pointed out technical (cost, compatibility, validation, knowledge, and others) and HCI (intuitive interfaces, metaphors adaptation, interactions simplification, usability, feedback on interactions with software, navigation optimization, and others) demands in the financial reporting area. This research also verified that those demands lead financial reporters toward problems as deviation from the agreed role/position, waste of human and material resources, and rework when the report data contains inconsistencies. This situation also degrades the efficiency of G2G and G2B e-Governance because some government institutions require private and public entities to submit those XBRL financial reports. Before that reality, this research investigated how HCI design can mitigate the presented research problem through a software prototype (the Open Financial Reporting) built under HCI design matters that provides XBRL knowledge abstraction, thus increasing task efficiency and improving G2G e-Governance. For further investigation, the software underwent formative usability, communicability, and UX evaluations with remote users that composed smaller versions of Siconfi's XBRL financial reports. Then, this research performed a new set of evaluations for conclusive purposes, with the software's redesigned (under HCI design matters) version, with the same testbed, and with another group of remote users. According to results obtained in the conclusive evaluation, the measured task efficiency was greater with the second version of the software. In that way, this research proved HCI design is a valid approach to increase the XBRL reporting professionals' task efficiency, thus improving G2G e-Governance. This research also attained other relevant contributions in the HCI and e-Government areas such as: finding the missing link between HCI, G2G e-Governance, and XBRL financial reporting, fiding a reproducible methodological approach to conduct similar studies in the context of G2G e-Governance, identifying the challenges for conducting similar studies, identifying free solutions for supporting HCI practices, thus preserving the gathered data quality and integrity, identifying solutions supporting remote HCI evaluation studies, developing a valid tool for supporting the XBRL financial report composition task, and others.