An empirical investigation to examine the usability issues of using adaptive, adaptable, and mixed-initiative approaches in in-teractive systems

The combination of graphical user interface (GUI) and usability evaluation presents an advantage to mastering every piece of software and ensuring perfect quality of work. The increasing demand for online learning is becoming more important, both individually and academically. This thesis introduces and describes an empirical study to investigate and compare how vocabulary can be learned by using different interactive approaches; specifically, a static learning website (with straightforward words and meanings), an adaptable learning website (allowing the user to choose a learning method), an adaptive learning website (a system-chosen way of learning), and a mixed-initiative (mixing approaches and techniques). The purpose of this study is to explore and determine the effects of these approaches in learning vocabu-lary achievement to enhance vocabulary learning for non-English speakers. The par-ticipants were Arabic speakers. The three levels of vocabulary learning activities were categorised as easy, medium, and hard. The independent variables (IVs) were controlled during the experiment to ensure consistency and were as follows: tasks, learning effects, and time. The dependent variables (DVs) were learning vocabulary achievements and scores. Two aims were explored in relation to the effects of these approaches to achievement. The first related to learning vocabularies for non-English speakers tackling the difficulties of the English language and the second related to studying system usability of learning English vocabulary in terms of usability measures (efficiency, frequency of error occurrence, effectiveness, and satisfaction). For this purpose, a vocabulary-learning language website was designed, implement-ed, and tested empirically. To fulfill these requirements, it was first necessary to measure two usability components (efficiency and effectiveness) with a within-subject design of n = 24 subjects recruited and, for users’ satisfaction, a between-subject design of n = 99 subjects recruited, while investigating satisfaction with a system usability scale (SUS) survey. The results and data analysis were described. Overall, the results shown were all satisfactory

Designing a user configurable online community framework

Content Management Systems (CMSs) are widely used to create online communities supporting organizations, classes, and groups. These communities provide various functionalities, e.g. discussion forums, shared repositories for documents and links, collaborative spaces, and different communication channels, like chat or instant messaging. Often the range of functionalities offered is unnecessarily rich, and some remain unused, leading to cluttered users’ workspaces and difficulties in finding information. Currently, communities that are developed with CMS do not allow user customization. Even for the community owner (e.g. a teacher, a group manager), it is hard to customize the functionality and interface of a community, because this requires some programming skills. I have designed new CMS allowing users of an online community (both owners and regular users) to design and configure their personal view of the community’s dashboard by adding the functionalities that are present in the community’s homepage and arranging them on the screen according to their preferences

Domino: exploring mobile collaborative software adaptation

Social Proximity Applications (SPAs) are a promising new area for ubicomp software that exploits the everyday changes in the proximity of mobile users. While a number of applications facilitate simple file sharing between co–present users, this paper explores opportunities for recommending and sharing software between users. We describe an architecture that allows the recommendation of new system components from systems with similar histories of use. Software components and usage histories are exchanged between mobile users who are in proximity with each other. We apply this architecture in a mobile strategy game in which players adapt and upgrade their game using components from other players, progressing through the game through sharing tools and history. More broadly, we discuss the general application of this technique as well as the security and privacy challenges to such an approach

Transparency in adaptive mobile user interfaces

User interfaces that enable us to use complicated systems have become omnipresent. Being it through desktop, tablet or mobile devices, a great deal of our interactions with interactive systems is perceived through graphical user interfaces. One of these user interfaces is the adaptive user interface, which adapts according to a user s interactions. This type of interactive system keeps track of a user s actions through a personalized user model. Users can experience great advantages from having personalized user interfaces: imagine different contexts being triggered depending on certain situations, all with great ease of access. Nevertheless, users will perceive these changes differently. In order to communicate these changes in an effective way, certain ways of transparently guiding the user have been proposed. In this thesis guidelines and principles to facilitate adaptive user interfaces are explored and applied to a novel mobile prototype, hence the title adaptive mobile user interfaces . This resulted in a transparent prototype, which effectively communicated change in the form of prompts and additional options to alter the changes. The second, non- transparent prototype, did not communicate these changes and was not alterable. In order to construct a viable evaluation of the prototype, physiological changes in the form of skin conductance data were tracked in order to measure participants stress levels. Additional user questionnaires were used to accompany this data. The prototypes were tested by two groups of participants in the form of a first usage and a second usage scenario. The first group perceived the transparent prototype to be highly likeable and effective, but the skin conductance data seemed to contradict this matter. Participants who tested the non-transparent prototype expressed less overall satisfaction towards the this type of prototype, results opposing the outcome of the skin conductance data. Therefore, the hypothesis that the non-transparent prototype would result in more perceived stress as opposed to the transparent prototype was only partially supported

Workload-based Automated Interface Mode Selection

The increase in the size of the Air Force\u27s Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) fleet, and the desire to reduce operational manning requirements, has led to an interest in Multiple Aircraft Control (MAC) technology. The MAC concept is highly prone to operator overload, as it requires operators to maintain awareness for multiple aircraft. To attempt to mitigate the potential of operator overload, this research introduces an agent into the system interface to assume responsibility for managing automation mode selection. The agent uses a novel dynamic scheme for determining how and when to introduce automation assistance to the operator. By using a reinforcement learning approach, the interface agent is able to correlate an operator\u27s workload and performance levels. This allows the agent to determine the most appropriate times to introduce automation assistance. By automating tasks at appropriate times, the agent helps the system balance the operator\u27s workload level, striking the best possible balance between operator awareness and overall performance, while reducing the potential for operator overload

Dynamically generated multi-modal application interfaces

This work introduces a new UIMS (User Interface Management System), which aims to solve numerous problems in the field of user-interface development arising from hard-coded use of user interface toolkits. The presented solution is a concrete system architecture based on the abstract ARCH model consisting of an interface abstraction-layer, a dialog definition language called GIML (Generalized Interface Markup Language) and pluggable interface rendering modules. These components form an interface toolkit called GITK (Generalized Interface ToolKit). With the aid of GITK (Generalized Interface ToolKit) one can build an application, without explicitly creating a concrete end-user interface. At runtime GITK can create these interfaces as needed from the abstract specification and run them. Thereby GITK is equipping one application with many interfaces, even kinds of interfaces that did not exist when the application was written. It should be noted that this work will concentrate on providing the base infrastructure for adaptive/adaptable system, and does not aim to deliver a complete solution. This work shows that the proposed solution is a fundamental concept needed to create interfaces for everyone, which can be used everywhere and at any time. This text further discusses the impact of such technology for users and on the various aspects of software systems and their development. The targeted main audience of this work are software developers or people with strong interest in software development

THE IMPACT OF LEARNING STYLES AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND ON USERS’ EXPERIENCE OF WEBSITES

Many different types of people now use websites for many sources of information. Nevertheless, the diversity and complexity of the online information available on websites and the desire to make websites provide all information for all users, regardless their interest, ability or characteristics, means that websites can be overwhelming to users. Museum websites are a case in point, trying to provide information to a great diversity of users. For these reasons, there have been numerous efforts to individualize user experiences in websites. These efforts have been based on users’ individual or group differences such as their goals, interests, preferences, knowledge, backgrounds, demographic characteristics, experience, learning styles, and culture. This programme of research investigates whether learning styles as an individual difference and cultural background as a group difference can affect web users’ experience, performance and perceived usability by conducting a card sort study, an interview study and an ecologically valid study of users’ experience with museum websites. To investigate learning styles, the Felder-Silverman Learning Style Model was used with its associated Felder-Solomon Index of Learning Styles (ILS). The ILS was developed in English, making it unsuitable for Turkish learners, one of the target cultural groups for this research programme. Therefore, the ILS was translated into Turkish and adequate reliability and validity established by administering it twice over a four-week interval to 63 undergraduate students in Turkey. Henceforth, the Turkish version of the ILS will be referred as the Turkish Index of Learning Styles (T)ILS. The aim of the card sort study was to investigate user understandings of the organization of the museum and news websites and to reveal learning styles and cultural differences between participants’ categorizations and mental models of the information architectures. The study was conducted in UK and Turkey with 214 and 90 participants, respectively. Analysis of the data showed that participants have mental models that differ substantially from the typical websites in these domains. In addition, interesting and meaningful differences were found between participants with different learning styles profiles and among British, Chinese, Indian and Turkish participants. This study also made a methodological contribution, showing that the card sort method can be used to show learning styles and cultural differences. The aim of the interview study was to investigate the perceptions of museum personnel concerning the adaptation of websites in relation to both learning styles and cultural differences among visitors and to investigate whether they were interested in these issues. Five developers from Turkey and five developers from UK and USA were interviewed and content analysis was used to analyze their responses. The study showed that almost none of the interviewees were aware of the concept of learning styles, but the majority were very interested when they were told about it. Furthermore, a majority of interviewees thought learning styles had potential to make their websites more appealing to a wider range of visitors. Lastly, most interviewees were interested in the idea of dealing with cultural differences in other ways than mere translation of texts. The final study investigated how learning styles and cultural differences affect users’ experience, performance and perception of the usability of two museum websites. It was administered in the UK with an international sample of 210 participants. Participants were asked to perform a number of tasks on these websites, the tasking being carefully chosen to direct participants to aspects of the websites that would suit particular learning styles. This study showed significant differences among users depending on their learning styles and cultural background. This study also makes an important methodological contribution in that moves away from the paradigm of trying to manipulate online materials to match or clash with users’ learning styles or other preferences. The results of this research programme will be important for developers of museum and similar websites who want to take the advantage of developing supportive websites by focusing on users’ learning styles and cultural differences

Digital inclusion - the vision, the challenges and the way forward

This paper considers the vision and aspiration of digital inclusion, and then examines the current reality. It looks beyond the rhetoric to provide an analysis of the status quo, a consideration of some facilitators and challenges to progress and some suggestions for moving forward with renewed energy and commitment. The far-reaching benefits of digital inclusion and the crucial role it plays in enabling full participation in our digital society are considered. At the heart of the vision of universal digital inclusion is the deceptively simple goal to ensure that everyone is able to access and experience the wide-ranging benefits and transformational opportunities and impacts it offers. The reality is a long way from the vision: inequality of access still exists despite many national campaigns and initiatives to reduce it. The benefits and beneficiaries of a digital society are not just the individual but all stakeholders in the wider society. Research evidence has shown that the critical success factors for successful digital participation are (i) appropriate design and (ii) readily available and on-going ICT (Information and Communication Technology) support in the community. Challenges and proven solutions are presented. The proposition of community hubs in local venues to provide user-centred ICT support and learning for older and disabled people is presented. While the challenges to achieve digital inclusion are very considerable, the knowledge of how to achieve it and the technologies which enable it already exist. Harnessing of political will is necessary to make digital inclusion a reality rather than a vision. With the cooperation and commitment of all stakeholders actualisation of the vision of a digitally inclusive society, while challenging, can be achieved and will yield opportunities and rewards that eclipse the cost of implementation