Title on signature form: Tutor's experience : a case study of usability and user experience in TutorTrac

This research examines the effectiveness of the TutorTrac web-based application by conducting a usability and user experience case study. TutorTrac is a management application designed to provide “on-demand access to essential tools, such as appointment scheduling, logging visits, and activity reports” (TracSystems, 2019). In this case, I focus on evaluating the scheduling function, because it is the primary task TutorTrac performs at the Ball State Learning Center. After gathering heuristic data from surveys and an eye tracking study, I analyze the ease of use, efficiency of task performance, and employee satisfaction when using TutorTrac. The objective of this document is to answer the following questions: 1) What are the usability problems in TutorTrac?, 2)what emotional impact does TutorTrac have on potential users?Thesis (M.A.)Department of Journalis

Determination and evaluation of web accessibility

The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; however, access to the web and its many applications cannot be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses a variety of concerns ranging from societal, political, and economic to individual, physical, and intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus, there are many perspectives from which web accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility framework is proposed using as its base a layered evaluation framework from Computer Supported Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard, ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is employed in recognition of the collaborative nature of the web and its importance in facilitating communication. The latter is employed to refine and extend the technical issues and to highlight the need for considering accessibility from the viewpoint of the web developer and maintainer as well as the web user. A technically inaccessible web is unlikely to be evolved over time. A final goal of the accessibility framework is to provide web developers and maintainers with a practical basis for considering web accessibility through the development of a set of accessibility factors associated with each identified layer

Design considerations for delivering e-learning to surgical trainees

Copyright © 2011, IGI Global. Distributed with permission.Challenges remain in leveraging e-health technologies for continuous medical education/professional development. This study examines the interface design and learning process features related to the use of multimedia in providing effective support for the knowledge and practice of surgical skills. Twenty-one surgical trainees evaluated surgical content on a CD-ROM format based on 14 interface design and 11 learning process features using a questionnaire adapted from an established tool created to assess educational multimedia. Significant Spearman’s correlations were found for seven of the 14 interface design features – ‘Navigation’, ‘Learning demands’, ‘Videos’, ‘Media integration’, ‘Level of material’, ‘Information presentation’ and ‘Overall functionality’, explaining ratings of the learning process. The interplay of interface design and learning process features of educational multimedia highlight key design considerations in e-learning. An understanding of these features is relevant to the delivery of surgical training, reflecting the current state of the art in transferring static CD-ROM content to the dynamic web or creating CD/web hybrid models of education

Evaluating usability of cross-platform smartphone applications

The computing power of smartphones is increasing as time goes. However, the proliferation of multiple different types of operating platforms affected interoperable smartphone applications development. Thus, the cross-platform development tools are coined. Literature showed that smartphone applications developed with the native platforms have better user experience than the cross-platform counterparts. However, comparative evaluation of usability of cross-platform applications on the deployment platforms is not studied yet. In this work, we evaluated usability of a crossword puzzle developed with PhoneGap on Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. The evaluation was conducted focusing on the developer's adaptation effort to native platforms and the end users. Thus, we observed that usability of the cross-platform crossword puzzle is unaffected on the respective native platforms and the SDKs require only minimal configuration effort. In addition, we observed the prospect of HTML5 and related web technologies as our future work towards evaluating and enhancing usability in composing REST-based services for smartphone applications

Evaluation of mobile health education applications for health professionals and patients

Paper presented at 8th International conference on e-Health (EH 2016), 1-3 July 2016, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. ABSTRACT Mobile applications for health education are commonly utilized to support patients and health professionals. A critical evaluation framework is required to ensure the usability and reliability of mobile health education applications in order to facilitate the saving of time and effort for the various user groups; thus, the aim of this paper is to describe a framework for evaluating mobile applications for health education. The intended outcome of this framework is to meet the needs and requirements of the different user categories and to improve the development of mobile health education applications with software engineering approaches, by creating new and more effective techniques to evaluate such software. This paper first highlights the importance of mobile health education apps, then explains the need to establish an evaluation framework for these apps. The paper provides a description of the evaluation framework, along with some specific evaluation metrics: an efficient hybrid of selected heuristic evaluation (HE) and usability evaluation (UE) factors to enable the determination of the usefulness and usability of health education mobile apps. Finally, an explanation of the initial results for the framework was obtained using a Medscape mobile app. The proposed framework - An Evaluation Framework for Mobile Health Education Apps – is a hybrid of five metrics selected from a larger set in heuristic and usability evaluation, filtered based on interviews from patients and health professionals. These five metrics correspond to specific facets of usability identified through a requirements analysis of typical users of mobile health apps. These metrics were decomposed into 21 specific questionnaire questions, which are available on request from first author

A usability study of online library systems: A case of Sultanah Bahiyah Library, Universiti Utara Malaysia

The purpose of this study was to investigate usability of online library systems in Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM). This study evaluated the usability of Sultanah Bahiyah Library’s web based systems by investigating the aspects of simplicity, comfort, user friendliness, control, readability, information adequacy/task match, navigability, recognition, access time, relevancy, consistency and visual presentation. This study examined user’s views about the usability of digital libraries whereas current and perceived importance. A sample of 45 students of Master of Business Administration (MBA) has been chosen. The Sultanah Bahiyah Library’s web based systems is very important especially for students and academic staffs of Universiti Utara Malaysia. The usability of the Library’s web based systems makes students easy to connect and for that the website should be helpful and attractive within good contents. The result found that the parallel nature of the users’ current views about the usability of digital libraries and users’ perceived importance of digital library usability allows direct comparison of all usability properties. The overall results yielded significant difference for the variables of user’s current views and perceived importance

Towards Developing an Online Social Media-based Mobile Learning System

The advancement of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and the Internet revolution gave rise to the several learning technologies on the web and mobile platform. During the last decade, the social media network became available for users to socialise and collaborate among peer group. Hence, The integration of e-learning and social media using mobile device as access point is to allow for learning and collaboration anytime, anywhere. This study seeks to provide learning on the social network platform for users to view the application on a mobile device and also foster collaboration among scholars. The system was developed using an open source Content Management System (CMS) Wordpress and Buddypress running on a WAMP or XAMPP server. MySQL was used as database. The usability of the System on the different mobile devices used was evaluated by identifying the usability attributes; designing a questionnaire based on those attributes and then analyzing the results with Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS). The results showed that the learning system had a good usability score on mobile device