Digital libraries: What do users want?

This is the post-print version of the Article of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2006 EmeraldPurpose – The purpose of this study is to determine user suggestions for digital libraries' functionality and features. Design/methodology/approach – A survey was conducted as part of this study, in which users' suggestions for digital libraries were solicited, as well as their ranking opinions on a range of suggested digital library features. Findings – The study revealed that, regardless of users' information technology (IT) backgrounds, their expectations of digital libraries' functionality are the same. However, based on users' previous experiences with digital libraries, their requirements with respect to specific features may change. Practical implications – Involving users in digital library design should be an integral step in the process of building a digital library – in addition to the classic roles of evaluation and testing. Originality/value – In previous digital library user studies, users were involved implicitly (e.g. observed) or explicitly (e.g. diary notes). However, they were never asked to suggest digital library features or functionalities, as this was left to usability and domain experts. This study approached digital library design from a new perspective, giving users an opportunity to express their suggestions on future functionality and features of digital libraries. Moreover, in contrast to previous work, this study has explicitly taken into account the IT abilities of those interacting with a digital library

Designing an Enhanced VUI Tree Framework for e- Education System

VoiceXML is a standard language recognized by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for developing Voice User Interface (VUI) applications. Advances in speech recognition and VUI systems have motivated the provision of a VUI design framework for interacting with vocal applications. For most developers, designing a VUI is a relatively new experience. Today, good VUI frameworks are few mainly because VUI design is novel and requires usability criteria for users’ friendliness and ease of navigation during interaction. This paper presents an enhanced VUI tree framework for Voice-Enabled E-Education System (VEES) using Multi-RootNode Tree to improve speed of access and user’s flexibility while interacting with the system. The propose system will be of immense benefit to the normal users and the visually impaired learners since it will make navigation, access speed and interaction process with the system a lot easier

Considering the Importance of User Profiles in Interface Design

User profile is a popular term widely employed during product design processes by industrial companies. Such a profile is normally intended to represent real users of a product. The ultimate purpose of a user profile is actually to help designers to recognize or learn about the real user by presenting them with a description of a real user’s attributes, for instance; the user’s gender, age, educational level, attitude, technical needs and skill level. The aim of this chapter is to provide information on the current knowledge and research about user profile issues, as well as to emphasize the importance of considering these issues in interface design. In this chapter, we mainly focus on how users’ difference in expertise affects their performance or activity in various interaction contexts. Considering the complex interaction situations in practice, novice and expert users’ interactions with medical user interfaces of different technical complexity will be analyzed as examples: one focuses on novice and expert users’ difference when interacting with simple medical interfaces, and the other focuses on differences when interacting with complex medical interfaces. Four issues will be analyzed and discussed: (1) how novice and expert users differ in terms of performance during the interaction; (2) how novice and expert users differ in the perspective of cognitive mental models during the interaction; (3) how novice and expert users should be defined in practice; and (4) what are the main differences between novice and expert users’ implications for interface design. Besides describing the effect of users’ expertise difference during the interface design process, we will also pinpoint some potential problems for the research on interface design, as well as some future challenges that academic researchers and industrial engineers should face in practice

Prototyping a process-centered environment

This paper describes an experimental system developed and used as a vehicle for prototyping the Arcadia-1 software development environment. Prototyping is viewed as a knowledge acquisition process and is used to reduce risks in software development by gaining rapid feedback about the suitability of a production system before the system is completed. Prototyping a software development environment is particularly important due to the lack of experience with them. There is an acute need to acquire knowledge about user interaction requirements for software environments. These needs are especially important for the Arcadia project, as it is one of the first attempts to construct a process-centered environment. Our prototyping effort addresses questions about effective interaction with a process-centered environment by simulating how Arcadia-1 would interact with users in a representative range of usage scenarios. We built a prototyping system, called PRODUCER, and used it to generate a variety of prototypes simulating user interactions with Arcadia-1 process programs.Experience with PRODUCER indicates that our approach is effective at risk reduction. The prototypes greatly improved communication with our customer. They confirmed some of our design decisions but also redirected our research efforts as a result of unexpected insight. We also found that prototyping usage scenarios provides conceptual guides and design information for process programmers. Most of the benefits of our prototyping effort derive from developing and interacting with usage scenarios, so our approach is generalizable to other prototyping systems. This paper reports on our prototyping approach and our experience in prototyping a process-centered environment

Designing attention-aware business intelligence and analytics dashboards

The design of user interface is known to influence the users’ attention while they are interacting with applications such as Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI&A) dashboards. BI&A dashboards are considered as critical because they contain a lot of compressed information and managers only spend a little time to process the provided information. Thereby, they need to manage their visual attention properly due to inattentional blindness and change blindness issues. We propose to investigate the design of BI&A dashboards that are sensitive to the users’ attention. So called attention-aware BI&A dashboards are of utmost importance in the field of BI&A systems since attention is known to play a major role in constructing decisions. We motivate our research project and present the initial design of attention-aware BI&A dashboards. Especially the inclusion of eye-tracking technology is an important aspect of our proposed design

DesignNet: a online knowledge gateway for industrial design education and research activities

This paper presents DesignNet, a knowledge-based system to the online digital display, retrieval and archiving of rich media resources for industrial design education and research. It addresses the needs of end-users (teachers, researchers and students) and content providers interacting with the School of Design of the Politecnico di Milano. The project moves from the assumption that traditional modalities of archiving and presentation currently adopted by the Politecnico and other academic institutions are not coherent with industrial design process and its need of project-support materials. The typical outputs of industrial design process are 3D models or 2D graphics, not just texts or simple images, the materials for which the usual method and technique of archiving and retrieval are conceived and developed. The challenges, philosophy and methodology in creating this evolving Web-based, cataloguing, multimedia knowledge-base to VR design resources are discussed. Finally, the related system and prototype are described

Mediating new individual-environment relations through experimentation on ambience

This article presents an exploration of two previously overlooked aspects of atmosphere. First, that atmosphere lies at the intersection of the natural, built and social environments. Second, that architectural design can bring an existing atmosphere to users’ attention. We present the hypothesis that, by bringing an existing atmosphere to users’ attention, architects can stimulate explorative behavior and the formation of new relations between individual and environment. This hypothesis is based on the ecological theory of perception, examples of contemporary experimental architecture and the ethics of ambiance. We explore our hypothesis with two experimentations on ambiance. The first experimentation follows the method of narrative inquiry and presents a reconceptualization of ‘the primitive hut’ by Marc-Antoine Laugier. Results from the experimentation show how elements such as a gush of wind can be perceived as an architectural quality. The second experimentation follows the method of research by design and presents the theoretically-driven design process of the installation Urban Carpet. The first results show that the installation made users more aware of their body-in-space, and users started interacting with the site in a new way. The experimentations introduce new methods to ambiance research and shift the research focus to mediation of new individual-environment relations

Online cake instructor

This thesis will be an e-learning website about making cakes. Users will learn how to make a cake in a virtual environment by following the instructions and interacting with the surroundings, instead of learning from text statements. “Simulation” will be a focus in this thesis. Users will go through the cooking process by using virtual tools and a virtual oven. The final goal of the online courses is that users should use those virtual materials and tools correctly without a cue. Still images, videos, 3D models, and animations will be used to simulate the whole process. As an e-learning material, there will be two sections, instruction mode and quiz mode, in this website. When people practice in the virtual kitchen and make a mistake, there will be instant feedback will be given in the form of suggestions. Regarding the technology issues, I want to explore the usability of 3D technology in e-learning material design. In my opinion, 3D technology, which is usually used to simulate the reality in computer graphics arts, should bring the advantages of e-learning materials, simulation, and virtual experience, into full play. In addition, programming in e-learning material design plays an important role. How to use it to judge users’ “mistakes,” give them rapid feedback, and make the cake-making process smooth are other challenges in this thesis. The URL: http://www.yushiu.com.tw/cake/index.htm

In search of design synthesis by linking ergonomic evaluation and constraint modelling to attain design for all

To enable designers to ‘design for all’, a sound understanding of the intended users, their anthropometry and mobility is needed. Information is also required regarding users’ abilities and disabilities based on the tasks they are to perform while using the product being designed. Users, each of whom is an individual (and not just a part of the population), have different needs, physical sizes, coping strategies, abilities and disabilities. To use and apply each of these parameters together with the variables of the product and to meet the challenges of ‘design for all’ criteria, it is imperative for the designers to use effective and efficient tools. This paper presents an approach for design synthesis with the objective of determining design parameters of a design that would meet the needs of a specified user population or maximise the percentage accommodation. A new software tool is being developed to assist designers in the product development process. This software is able to suggest design parameters that would maximise user accommodation, after considering all the data sets for individual users. To achieve this, the software utilises capabilities of three very different pieces of software. The first of these is called HADRIAN, which is the prototype software currently under development, by the ‘Design for All’ project group at Loughborough University. HADRIAN provides an integrated database about individual users and can carry out a task analysis for the tasks that the user has to perform when interacting with the product or the environment that is being developed. Mathematical analysis software is used to fit functions to this data so that the SWORDS Constraint Modelling software can be used to find the optimum parameters of the design that would maximise the user accommodation. Issues in the design and implementation of this software system are discussed in the context of simple examples from kitchen design and automated teller machines (ATMs)

ANALYZING USER INTERACTION LOGS OF AN EDUCATIONAL VISUALIZATION SYSTEM TO UNDERSTAND HOW STUDENTS GENERATE INSIGHTS

Department of Computer Science and EngineeringVisual analytics systems have been becoming popular in many domains. Recently, a visual analytical tool, VAiRoma is designed in educational domain to support students learn the history class. However, how users are interacting with such systems is still not known enough. In an educational domain, it is important to know how users are gaining insights. It may give us an opportunity to understand the user???s learning style, so that we can design better visualization tools in the future. In this thesis, I will analyze the interaction logs of an educational visualization system, VAiRoma, in order to explore how users generating insights via the system. Based on the results, users tried more explorative interactions at the initial stages of their insight generation path. In the middle of the path, users mostly read some textual information. Toward the end, they attempted to show their understandings from what they learnt by creating an annotation. There is also a cyclic behavior of an insight generation path. In 38% of cases, during the annotation creation process, the users cancelled to ???create an annotation??? and went back to read some textual information.ope