Usability Evaluation Trends in Ibero-American Countries

Usability evaluation is a major area of humancomputer interaction (HCI) in both academia and industry. According to Nielsen, on the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If a homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to read or doesn’t answer users’ key questions, they leave. We conducted a survey in diverse Ibero-American countries of both academic institutions and software development companies to determine how usability evaluation is performed, taking into account methods, techniques, software tools, and usability laboratories

Simulation in manufacturing and business: A review

Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.This paper reports the results of a review of simulation applications published within peer-reviewed literature between 1997 and 2006 to provide an up-to-date picture of the role of simulation techniques within manufacturing and business. The review is characterised by three factors: wide coverage, broad scope of the simulation techniques, and a focus on real-world applications. A structured methodology was followed to narrow down the search from around 20,000 papers to 281. Results include interesting trends and patterns. For instance, although discrete event simulation is the most popular technique, it has lower stakeholder engagement than other techniques, such as system dynamics or gaming. This is highly correlated with modelling lead time and purpose. Considering application areas, modelling is mostly used in scheduling. Finally, this review shows an increasing interest in hybrid modelling as an approach to cope with complex enterprise-wide systems