Enhancing card sorting dendrograms through the holistic analysis of distance methods and linkage criteria

Card sorting has been widely used in information architecture to analyze and improve web content and navigation. This is an intuitive and cost-effective technique also useful in user research and evaluation. However, while the implementation of sorting tasks comprises a constructive and easy-toaccomplish process, the quantitative analysis of resulting card-sorting data can be a challenge for non-skilled evaluators. Several tools exist to support sorting tasks and data analysis, but still some users utilize custom spreadsheets or statistical packages in order to enhance analysis and obtain more expressive and comparable results. One of the most utilized diagrams for analyzing card-sorting results is the dendrogram, also known as a tree diagram, which is commonly based on an agglomerative clustering representation depicting groupings of related cards. However, several issues have to be considered by evaluators in order to produce meaningful dendrograms for decisionmaking. In fact, the distance method and the linkage criterion greatly influence the final dendrogram obtained. In this paper, an analysis on distance methods and linkage criteria for obtaining suitable dendrograms is proposed. The main aim is to guide evaluators and usability engineers to produce appropriate dendrograms based on available cardsorting data. In this sense, the provided clues can be widely applied to any card-sorting domain and sample size, improving card-sorting analysis by comparing different solutions through goodness indicators. Analyses applied to a publicly available dataset indicate that the results are highly dependent of the data type, so the right selection of both distance method and linkage criterion is essential for obtaining a suitable dendrogram and correctly interpreting the resultsThis work was partially supported by the Spanish Government (grant number RTI2018-095255-B-I00) and the Madrid Research Council (grant number P2018/TCS-4314

Hipermedia adaptativa en la enseñanza-aprendizaje de procesos de optimización

Con la progresiva evolución de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación, llamadas TICs, y su rol protagónico en la Red de Redes “Internet”, se produce un cambio trascendental en la Educación a Distancia. El nuevo paradigma educativo debe conjugar las características de la educación presencial con la potencialidad de recursos didácticos de las TICs, como son los Sistemas Hipermedia Adaptativos (SHA), proyectando un espacio virtual de aprendizaje en donde el alumno asume un rol protagónico, activo, en el proceso de enseñanza – aprendizaje, construyendo significados, materializando el “Aprender a Aprender”, independizándose de las variables tiempo y espacio. Este nuevo contexto nos impulsa a abordar los nuevos desafíos educativos que se plantean y es el origen de nuestro grupo interdisciplinario que, con la participación de especialistas de España, se propone investigar y desarrollar un Sistema Hipermedia Adaptativo para la enseñanza del Cálculo, para la Optimización con el uso de funciones, que llamaremos SHACO. Estos espacios de aprendizaje permiten configurar un entorno educativo adecuado al perfil de cada alumno, constituyéndose en un poderoso recurso didáctico y facilitando así la construcción de significados. El alumno adquiere un rol activo en la construcción de su aprendizaje. Estos espacios son un complemento importante en las clases tradicionales o presenciales, pero su principal uso es la generación de espacios virtuales de aprendizaje, para aprovechar al máximo las propuestas de educación a distancia a través de Internet. Se trabaja con procesos de Optimización, comenzando con funciones de una variable independiente y luego con funciones de varias variables independientes. Luego se extiende a la Optimización de funciones sujetas a restricciones expresadas con igualdades. Con esta metodología se pueden plantear cursos a distancia, favoreciendo la llegada de la enseñanza universitaria a lugares más remotos y descomprimiendo las aulas, a veces con excesiva cantidad de alumnos, sin perder la atención personalizada del docente a través de la red.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Hipermedia adaptativa en la enseñanza-aprendizaje de procesos de optimización

Con la progresiva evolución de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación, llamadas TICs, y su rol protagónico en la Red de Redes “Internet”, se produce un cambio trascendental en la Educación a Distancia. El nuevo paradigma educativo debe conjugar las características de la educación presencial con la potencialidad de recursos didácticos de las TICs, como son los Sistemas Hipermedia Adaptativos (SHA), proyectando un espacio virtual de aprendizaje en donde el alumno asume un rol protagónico, activo, en el proceso de enseñanza – aprendizaje, construyendo significados, materializando el “Aprender a Aprender”, independizándose de las variables tiempo y espacio. Este nuevo contexto nos impulsa a abordar los nuevos desafíos educativos que se plantean y es el origen de nuestro grupo interdisciplinario que, con la participación de especialistas de España, se propone investigar y desarrollar un Sistema Hipermedia Adaptativo para la enseñanza del Cálculo, para la Optimización con el uso de funciones, que llamaremos SHACO. Estos espacios de aprendizaje permiten configurar un entorno educativo adecuado al perfil de cada alumno, constituyéndose en un poderoso recurso didáctico y facilitando así la construcción de significados. El alumno adquiere un rol activo en la construcción de su aprendizaje. Estos espacios son un complemento importante en las clases tradicionales o presenciales, pero su principal uso es la generación de espacios virtuales de aprendizaje, para aprovechar al máximo las propuestas de educación a distancia a través de Internet. Se trabaja con procesos de Optimización, comenzando con funciones de una variable independiente y luego con funciones de varias variables independientes. Luego se extiende a la Optimización de funciones sujetas a restricciones expresadas con igualdades. Con esta metodología se pueden plantear cursos a distancia, favoreciendo la llegada de la enseñanza universitaria a lugares más remotos y descomprimiendo las aulas, a veces con excesiva cantidad de alumnos, sin perder la atención personalizada del docente a través de la red.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Development of usable applications featuring QR codes for enhancing interaction and acceptance: a case study

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Behaviour & Information Technology on Jan 11, 2022, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2021.2022209QR codes provide potential opportunities to improve interaction in different areas of application. Even so, this technology has been utilised in punctual and specific standalone applications, being barely applied to broader contexts, such as the educational one, where different scenarios can be considered to take advantage of the same QR-code approach. In this paper, key issues for the development of applications that utilise QR codes to improve sharing and availability of resources are presented, specifically focusing on improving interaction and acceptance. In this way, a holistic approach has been developed where the system is aimed at improving the interaction between educators and students. On the one hand, educators use a web interface to manage educational resources and announcements and automatically generate QR codes. On the other hand, students scan those QR codes using a mobile device, obtaining updated information related to their lectures. This scenario has been evaluated by educators and students, obtaining good results in terms of acceptance, cognitive burden, and overall usability. The approach provides development clues and the evaluation method that can be applied to different contexts, thus representing a generalisable solution.This work was supported by Madrid Research Council: [grant Number P2018/TCS-4314]; Spanish Government: [grant Number RTI2018-095255-B-I00]

Monitoring and forecasting usability indicators: a business intelligence approach for leveraging user-centered evaluation data

Monitoring performance indicators has become a main concern for most organizations today. While much attention has been paid to developing economic, bioinformatics, health, and social media dashboards, little or no attention has been devoted to monitoring and forecasting usability indicators. This can be of interest for analyzing the degree of perceived satisfaction and usability of interactive software products designed or just developed, being also useful as general strategic indicators in human-centered organizations. This paper presents an approach including main measures, Key Performance Indicators, trends, and forecasts to deal with usability information over time and produce new knowledge based on historical data. Also, an instance has been implemented, including data obtained from real software evaluations. Target users have evaluated the approach to validate its suitability, obtaining successful usability results that denote the adequacy of the approach presentedThis work was partially supported by the Spanish Research Agency [grant numbers TED2021-129381B-C21 and PID2021- 122270OB-I00

FERRAMENTAS DE AUTORIA DE SISTEMAS HIPERMÍDIA ADAPTATIVOS PARA APRENDIZAGEM: UM PONTO DE SITUAÇÃO

Um Sistema Hipermídia Adaptativo (SHA) define-se como sendo um sistema de visualização em que os conteúdos a apresentar, a sua forma de apresentação e navegação são ajustados de acordo com as características de cada utilizador, com o objetivo de guiá-lo para a informação mais relevante, desviando-o de informação menos interessantes ou que ele não conseguiria entender. A utilização de SHA em processos deEnsino/Aprendizagem (SHAA) torna-se assim bastante eficaz, pela capacidade de oferecer ao aluno os estímulos cognitivos corretos no momento adequado, facilitando o ntrajeto construtivista de aprendizagem. Este estudo debruça-se sobre as características atuais das ferramentas de autoria de SHAA, permitindo determinar as mais adequadas para uma determinada finalidade e, ao mesmo tempo, detectar eventuais fragilidades

Enhancing decision-making in user-centered web development: a methodology for card-sorting analysis

The World Wide Web has become a common platform for interactive software development. Most web applications feature custom user interfaces used by millions of people every day. Information architecture addresses the structural design of information to build quality web applications with improved usability of content, navigation, and findability. One of the most frequently utilized information architecture methods is card sorting—an affordable, user-centered approach for eliciting and evaluating categories and navigable items. Card sorting facilitates decision-making during the development process based on users’ mental models of a given application domain. However, although the qualitative analysis of card sorts has become common practice in information architecture, the quantitative analysis of card sorting is less widely applied. The reason for this gap is that quantitative analysis often requires the use of customized techniques to extract meaningful information for decision-making. To facilitate this process and support the structuring of information, we propose a methodology for the quantitative analysis of card-sorting results in this paper. The suggested approach can be systematically applied to provide clues and support for decisions. These might significantly impact the design and, thus, the final quality of the web application. Therefore, the approach includes proper goodness values that enable comparisons among the results of the methods and techniques used and ensure the suitability of the analyses performed. Two publicly available datasets were used to demonstrate the key issues related to the interpretation of card sorting results and the overall suitability and validity of the proposed methodologyThis work was partially supported by the Spanish Government [grant number RTI2018-095255-B-I00]; and the Madrid Research Council [Grant Number P2018/TCS-4314

Third international workshop on Authoring of adaptive and adaptable educational hypermedia (A3EH), Amsterdam, 18-22 July, 2005

The A3EH follows a successful series of workshops on Adaptive and Adaptable Educational Hypermedia. This workshop focuses on models, design and authoring of AEH, on assessment of AEH, conversion between AEH and evaluation of AEH. The workshop has paper presentations, poster session and panel discussions