Foregrounding accessibility for user experience design

textI am interested in creating generative tools and techniques for designing accessible user experiences for end users. As a user experience designer, I am working on embracing the web accessibility standards and guidelines and including them from the beginning of the User Experience (UX) design process. My projects are directed at facilitating design students and professionals to understand two things: that the broad concept of web accessibility is important, and how they can embed web accessibility into the UX design process at a very early stage. To do this, I used different media (website, posters and videos etc.) to create awareness and educate designers in an interesting, simple and engaging way. In this report, I will discuss the definition and role of accessible design, identify limitations in existing tools and methods, and demonstrate how future designers might research, prototype, analyze, and implement their designs for all users.Desig

Designing citizen science tools for learning: lessons learnt from the iterative development of nQuire

This paper reports on a 4-year research and development case study about the design of citizen science tools for inquiry learning. It details the process of iterative pedagogy-led design and evaluation of the nQuire toolkit, a set of web-based and mobile tools scaffolding the creation of online citizen science investigations. The design involved an expert review of inquiry learning and citizen science, combined with user experience studies involving more than 200 users. These have informed a concept that we have termed ‘citizen inquiry’, which engages members of the public alongside scientists in setting up, running, managing or contributing to citizen science projects with a main aim of learning about the scientific method through doing science by interaction with others. A design-based research (DBR) methodology was adopted for the iterative design and evaluation of citizen science tools. DBR was focused on the refinement of a central concept, ‘citizen inquiry’, by exploring how it can be instantiated in educational technologies and interventions. The empirical evaluation and iteration of technologies involved three design experiments with end users, user interviews, and insights from pedagogy and user experience experts. Evidence from the iterative development of nQuire led to the production of a set of interaction design principles that aim to guide the development of online, learning-centred, citizen science projects. Eight design guidelines are proposed: users as producers of knowledge, topics before tools, mobile affordances, scaffolds to the process of scientific inquiry, learning by doing as key message, being part of a community as key message, every visit brings a reward, and value users and their time

Systematic evaluation of design choices for software development tools

[Abstract]: Most design and evaluation of software tools is based on the intuition and experience of the designers. Software tool designers consider themselves typical users of the tools that they build and tend to subjectively evaluate their products rather than objectively evaluate them using established usability methods. This subjective approach is inadequate if the quality of software tools is to improve and the use of more systematic methods is advocated. This paper summarises a sequence of studies that show how user interface design choices for software development tools can be evaluated using established usability engineering techniques. The techniques used included guideline review, predictive modelling and experimental studies with users

A conceptual model for e-learning supporting tools design based on cue model and Kansei engineering

The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered changes in learning due to the practice of social distancing to curb the spread of the virus. E-learning platforms have become the main platform for learning throughout the pandemic. However, e-learning does have challenges when it comes to ensuring student’s optimum participation throughout the learning experience that require extensive research about techniques and methods for an optimum e-learning experience. This includes various e-learning supporting tools that provides easy communication and immediate assistance to enhance user experience. The supporting tools or software usability and functionality design determined as imperative in enhancing the e-learning user experience. Thus, this research proposes a conceptual model for designing the e-learning supporting tools based on the CUE Model, integrated with Kansei Engineering for optimum user experience that can serve as a guideline for the e-learning supporting tools designer. The outcome of this research will create new research fields that incorporate multiple domains, including the e-learning domain, software and supporting tools design, emotions and user experience

Comparative analysis of interface sketch design tools in the context of User Experience

The design stage plays a significant role in software development. Making skeleton models helps to understand the specification and requirements of the product. Design tools, as well as any other tools, should focus on User Experience. The aim of the publication is to compare tools for sketching interfaces taking into account User Experience. The main criterion for the evaluation of the tools was a test consisting in measuring the time and distance of a computer mouse during the execution of a given application sketch in 8 selected tools. Then, the respondents assessed the possibilities and experiences resulting from working in a given tool. This was supplemented by the assessment of the technical criteria. Ultimately, the best and the worst tools were selected according to the research subgroups. The level of education has been proven to influence the evaluation of interface sketch design tools

Computational Simulation and 3D Virtual Reality Engineering Tools for Dynamical Modeling and Imaging of Composite Nanomaterials

An adventure at engineering design and modeling is possible with a Virtual Reality Environment (VRE) that uses multiple computer-generated media to let a user experience situations that are temporally and spatially prohibiting. In this paper, an approach to developing some advanced architecture and modeling tools is presented to allow multiple frameworks work together while being shielded from the application program. This architecture is being developed in a framework of workbench interactive tools for next generation nanoparticle-reinforced damping/dynamic systems. Through the use of system, an engineer/programmer can respectively concentrate on tailoring an engineering design concept of novel system and the application software design while using existing databases/software outputs.Comment: Submitted on behalf of TIMA Editions (http://irevues.inist.fr/tima-editions

Experience-driven Engineering in IoT: The Importance of User Experience for Developing Connected Products People Love

In this paper, we describe the factors we have seen as influential in building contemporary tools specifically through the lens of connected devices and experiences. The Internet of things (IoT) provides a radically improved way to see how our tools/devices actually perform in the field and if customers use, abuse, or do not understand them. The complexity associated with designing a connected product or experience often causes its architect to focus almost exclusively on the enabling technology itself as opposed to the actual design and end user experience—the value or utility—that they create it for. We walk through fundamental design principles. This paper provides principles, frameworks, recommendations, and resources to ensure human-centered and user experience-led design for the IoT

Supporting Usability and Reusability Based on eLearning Standards

The IMS-QTI, and other related specifications have been developed to support the creation of reusable and pedagogically neutral assessment scenarios and content, as stated by the IMS Global Learning Consortium. In this paper we discuss how current specifications both constrain the design of assessment scenarios, and limit content reusability. We also suggest some solutions to overcome these limitations. The paper is based on our experience developing and testing an IMS QTI Lite compliant assessment authoring tool, QAed. It supports teacher centering, which is quite neglected when designing such tools. In the paper we also discuss how to make compatible standards support and user centering in eLearning applications and provide some recommendations for the design of the user interfaces

Designing novel applications inspired by emerging media technologies

The field of Human-Computer Interaction provides a number of useful tools and methods for obtaining information on end-users and their usage context to inform the design of computer systems, yet relatively little is known on how to go about designing for a completely novel application where there is no user base, no existing practice of use available at the start. The success of the currently available HCI methodology that focuses on understanding users’ needs and establishing requirements is well-deserved in making computing applications usable in terms of fitting them to end-users’ usage contexts. However, too much emphasis on identifying user needs tends to stifle other more exploratory design activities where new types of applications are invented in order to discover or create new activities currently not practiced. In this paper, we argue that a great starting point of novel application design is not the problem space (trying to rigorously define the user requirements) but the solution space (trying to leverage emerging computational technologies and growing design knowledge for various interaction platforms), and we build a foundation for a pragmatic design methodology supported by the authors’ extensive experience in designing novel applications inspired by emerging media technologies