Usability

Heuristic Evaluation (Nielsen and Molich, 1990; Nielsen, 1994) is a method of usability evaluation where an analyst finds usability problems by checking the user interface against a set of supplied heuristics or principles.

Three new heuristics for software visualisations have been added to the set described in (Nielsen, 1994). A set of evaluation materials for these heuristics are presented, in particular:

• A structured description of Heuristic Evaluation to ease learning and use;
• A self assessed test to allow analysts to assess their understanding of Heuristic Evaluation;
• A checklist of heuristics for use in the analysis;
• Problem record sheets to record usability problems during analysis. Currently, these only record the usability problem predicted. In future, these could be modified to include recommended solutions to these problems (Jeffries, 1994);
• A questionnaire to fill in after the analysis

Heuristic Evaluation (Nielsen and Molich, 1990; Nielsen, 1994) is a method of usability evaluation where an analyst finds usability problems by checking the user interface against a set of supplied heuristics or principles.

A set of evaluation materials for the heuristics described in (Nielsen, 1994) are presented, in particular:

• A structured description of Heuristic Evaluation to ease learning and use;
• A self assessed test to allow analysts to assess their understanding of Heuristic Evaluation;
• A checklist of heuristics for use in the analysis;
• Problem record sheets to record usability problems during analysis. Currently, these only record the usability problem predicted. In future, these could be modified to include recommended solutions to these problems (Jeffries, 1994);
• A questionnaire to fill in after the analysis

This paper reports on a study of evaluating and generating requirements for the user interface of a digital library. The study involved observation of librarians using the digital library, working on information finding problems on behalf of clients of the library. The study showed that librarians, familiar with the particular digital library system and with information retrieval work in general, possess a repertoire of relatively simple, yet effective, strategies for carrying out searches, and that non-librarians tend not to deploy the same strategies. After ...

ABSTRACT Human factors and ergonomics applies scientific information about human cognition and behavior to support the design of products and systems that enhance human well-being and performance. Human factors and ergonomics professionals investigate human–system interaction at the individual, group, and organizational levels. The aim is to design products that augment human physical, cognitive, and motivational capabilities and improve the social, technical, and organizational aspects of a system. Human factors and ergonomics has been used to improve safety and productivity particularly in complex sociotechnical systems.

This deliverable has been produced in the context of the Knowledge-Practice Laboratory (KPLab) project, which is aimed at facilitating innovative practices of working with knowledge in higher education, teacher training, and professional networks. This delverable is a synopsis of the first experiences encountered during the first 6 months of the work in WP10. WP10 focused on tools and practices where elicitation, capturing and creating knowledge in different representational modes aims to making them available for problem solving and collaborative knowledge advancement in professional networks. During the first 6 months the emphasis of work has been on the state-of-the-art research, organizing and negotiating the empirical cases with professional organizations and on the coevolutionary process of defining the requirements of KP-Lab tools and practices. State-ofthe- art research has concentrated on how In WP 10 we have started to refine the research approaches as there were no ready ...

This paper describes the use of adaptation patterns in the task of formulating standards for adaptive educational hypermedia (AEH) systems that is currently under investigation by the EU ADAPT project. Within this project, design dimensions for high granularity patterns have been established. In this paper we focus on detailing lower granularity adaptive patterns based upon learning styles. Several patterns from existing AEH system case studies are identified and classified according to an extended learning style "onion" model. This model forms the basis of a learning style taxonomy, introduced here, whose components determine adaptation patterns for AEH. These patterns are of importance both for authoring, as well as for interfacing between adaptive hypermedia systems. From an authoring point of view, these patterns may be used to establish a fine-grain approach to instructional strategies that can be implemented in AEH systems, as a response to a particular learning style. The implementation of this adaptation pattern taxonomy is discussed, both generally and in detail.

A Tyranny of Evaluation could be palatable if it wasn’t so impoverished. Henry Lieberman complained at the CHI 2003 Fringe about having to do bad evaluation. As an evaluation evaluator, I sympathise, but rather than banish skinny evaluation warlords, I’m trying to fatten them up and civilise them. Like a hungry wolf, evaluation can savage and devour design, but design must feed evaluation to tame it. I’ve drawn up a new HCI menu for this, but I’ve not managed to cook and taste much yet. It’s a banquet too large for my localresearch kitchen. Adding a few super chefs and their teams won’t be enough. It’s now time for CHI 2.0 – high bandwidth collaborative social networking for the biggest method bake in HCI history.

The International Standards Organization definition of usability as documented in ISO 9241-11 is for " …specified users… specified goals… particular environments " which implies that usability varies based on those three factors. The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a ten item questionnaire developed to evaluate systems' usability. Consequently, SUS became the scale of choice for measuring usability, broadly applied to various systems including websites. Contemporary websites are visited by a wide range of users for different reasons and from all kinds of environments-can SUS still effectively measure their usability? For a professional organization such as IxDA whose focus is user interface design a heuristic evaluation aided by the Expert Review Checkpoints provides detailed feedback on its website's compliance with contemporary design standards that affect usability.

In this paper, we address some sociological and political issues linked to the emerging of distributed, real-time “living maps”. A "living map" is a merger between a territory map and a dynamic localized flows representation creating visual information where places, people, activities, and time are mixed together. Starting with the hypothesis of transformation in urban meeting manners, we propose a typology of living maps and we discuss the social and privacy issues linked to each type of use.

A Cognitive Walkthrough is a method for predicting usability problems with an interactive system. Usability problems are aspects of the system which could reduce the usability of the system for the user, for example to confuse them, to slow them down to stop them completing their task. In particular, Cognitive Walkthough focuses on problems related to the learnability of a system.

The following materials are provided:

• A description of Cognitive Walkthrough;
• A self assessed test to allow analysts to assess their understanding of Cognitive Walkthrough;
• A checklist of Cognitive Walkthrough for use in the analysis;
• Problem record sheets to record usability problems during analysis. Currently, these only record the usability problem predicted. In future, these could be modified to include recommended solutions to these problems (Jeffries, 1994);
• A questionnaire to fill in after the analysis

Interiority is not just the science of interior design that meets of needs of function and aesthetics alone. Both of these are indeed the main task in interior design. Each building is design and built to fulfill certain functions. Hotels, apartments, and houses for example, serves as a means of accommodation. Restaurant serves as a commercial building that meets the needs of food. A public building should be accessible and used by a variety of different needs. These building must be accessible to those who can see or not (blinds), walkers and wheelchair users, and those who are able to listen or not (deaf/hard of hearing). This paper is a theoretical study and application of universal design that is accessible to public buildings that function as a university. The case studies taken in this research are University of Mercu Buana in west Jakarta and University of Daegu in South Korea. The study was conducted by study of universal design of two universities by considering two parameters, namely universal design and usability, by conducting literature study and user interviews. From results of study its found that university in Daegu have make of universal design and usability factors an important part of design, while University of Mercu Buana in West Jakarta hasn't fully made these two factors as part of the design, with many facilities not being able to accessed and used universally well

This experiment investigates what happens to user performance
and disorientation when visual conventions of a genre are
violated. It also looks at what happens to the user performance
and disorientation over time. Twenty-eight participants were
randomly allocated to two independent groups: one was tested
with a conventional website and the other with a convention violating website.

The study comprised of two parts and on each
part participants were tested on a different website. Results
showed that in the first part participants who used the violating
site performed worse and were more disoriented than participants
who used the conventional version. But the performance of the
participants of the convention-violating group improved over time
so that by the end of the first part performance on both groups were equivalent. In the second part performance and disorientation on both groups were equivalent suggesting that users might rapidly adapt to visual convention violations.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the usability of the mobile application of Centralized Hospital Appointment System (CHAS) developed by the Ministry of Health in 2012, as part of e-government efforts in Turkey. A study group was formed consisting of 16 people, 8 females and 8 males between the ages of 18 and 55, and selected for their CHAS experience. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used as part of a mixed research design. Qualitative data sources for the study consisted of observation notes taken while performing authentic tasks that were selected through field research, notes generated by the think-aloud method and meeting notes taken after the process. Quantitative data were collected with a performance evaluation form and questionnaire. Researchers analyzed the data using SPSS 21 program for the quantitative data, and using Microsoft Word and Excel for the qualitative data derived from the participant group. Descriptive analysis, nonparametric chi-square test (sing...

To assist learning, preparation of suitable learning material is recommended along with a blended learning approach. Educational videos could be considered as a tool that can be adapted. This study aimed to develop educational videos for three (3) selected topics in Digital Illustration course offered to FirstYear Multimedia undergraduate students. ADDIE instructional design model was used to develop those educational videos. This study started with choosing a topic, designing storyboards, developing videos, uploading prototype videos to Google Drive for evaluation purposes, and conducting a usability evaluation on selected respondents. Finding from the user testing showed it was ascertained that the students agreed to use videos to enhance their understanding in selected topics in the Digital Illustration course. There should be continuous improvement in the educational videos specifically in including additional content to further enhance the videos.

Errors occur in every user interface, some user-based while others are system-based. There are two main types of errors: mistakes and slips. Mistakes are of conscious choice—when a user considers how to use a system or complete a task, then ultimately chooses an option that leads to an undesired outcome. Alternatively, a slip is an unintended error—when a user performs a task incorrectly and unintentionally. In many cases there are overlaps between the two error types (Johnson 259-260).

As expected, each of these error types also break down into several sub-types. This paper will focus on a select few slip error types, to demonstrate the effects that often plague users of the Apple TV Siri remote control. These errors include: capture slips—user performs a task that is similar to a more well-known flow instead of the intended action; description slip—user attempts an action on the wrong object type; and motor slip—the user’s fingers don’t complete the intended task (Johnson 262-265).

Despite an increasing awareness of user-centred design, there is limited discussion of how such approaches can be translated into the resource and time-constrained environments of medical engineering departments; yet, much of the work in such environments involves the prescription and tailoring of equipment for an individual. This article explores the suitability of adopting a User Centred Design approach to understanding the needs of ten switch users who have complex disabilities in a busy Rehabilitation Engineering Unit of a National Health Service hospital. A hybrid User Centred Design (UCD) approach was developed and tested using a range of qualitative techniques, including: user interviews in the home environment; content analysis; and affinity mapping. This approach enabled clinical engineers to work alongside design researchers to elicit key parameters for future switch designs. A number of themes emerged relating to the day-to-day use of environmental controls by individuals with a limited range of lower limb movements. A key finding concerning switch use was the importance that users placed on the ability of a switching device to increase their independence and have control of their activities. Conversely, there was also the revelation that in some cases the effort invested in using an assistive technology was not worth the gain to the user. In such cases having a carer perform the task instead was preferential. This paper documents a university-affiliated research team’s efforts to guide user-led practice and product insight acquisition with the implementation of a user-centred, design approach.

Full article available to download here:
http://uxpajournal.org/ucd-method-assistive-switch-devices-accessibility/

SFX is an XML based product designed to inter-link electronic resources with other resources in context-sensitive manner. SFX was first developed at the University of Ghent by Herbert Von de Sompel and has been released as a commercial product by Ex Libris. Use statistics garnered from SFX's statistics module since the implementation July of 2001 are discussed in the context of an academic research library environment. The results from usability testing conducted at Washington State University are reported.  These usage statistics demonstrated a pattern of increasing use and exceptional use from FirstSearch databases.

This paper describes the development of a fetch-and-carry robot to assist physically impaired people in an office environment. Different methods involving users are employed in the project, including the task analysis, Hi-Fi simulation trials and focus group sessions. Through an iterative design process, a prototype robot system has been developed, with an enhanced robot platform including a graphical user interface and natural language interface. The users' need for continuous feedback from the robot has led to the development of an animated character (CERO), which relates the two interface components and indicates the robot's current state by using simple gestures

Limited empirical research exists on the explicit relevance of hedonic dimensions (aesthetics and playfulness) of humancomputer interaction design to usability. This research aims to determine the effects of color temperature on the perceptions of websites aesthetics, playfulness, and in turn usability. A Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis of data collected from 328 participants in a four-group between-subject research design involving the use of a mock hotel website offered support for all nine hypotheses proposed. ‘Cooler’ colors (e.g. blue) were found to favorably impact perceptions of classical aesthetics, which in turn influenced perceptions of efficiency positively, while also correlating with perceptions of expressive aesthetics. The latter, on the other hand, were affected favorably by warmer colors (e.g. red), and had a positive effect on perceptions of playfulness. In line with prior usability studies, positive relationships between efficiency and effectiveness respectiv...