Principles of Human Computer Interaction Design: HCI Design

This book covers the design, evaluation and development process for interactive human computer interfaces including user interface design principles, task analysis, interface design methods, auditory interfaces, haptics, user interface evaluation, usability testing prototyping, issues in interface construction, interface evaluation, World Wide Web and mobile device interface issues.The book is ideal for the student that wants to learn how to use prototyping tools as part of the interface design and how to evaluate an interface and its interaction quality by using usability testing techniques

BioCreative III interactive task: an overview

The BioCreative challenge evaluation is a community-wide effort for evaluating text mining and information extraction systems applied to the biological domain. The biocurator community, as an active user of biomedical literature, provides a diverse and engaged end user group for text mining tools. Earlier BioCreative challenges involved many text mining teams in developing basic capabilities relevant to biological curation, but they did not address the issues of system usage, insertion into the workflow and adoption by curators. Thus in BioCreative III (BC-III), the InterActive Task (IAT) was introduced to address the utility and usability of text mining tools for real-life biocuration tasks. To support the aims of the IAT in BC-III, involvement of both developers and end users was solicited, and the development of a user interface to address the tasks interactively was requested

The Security Blanket of the Chat World: An Analytic Evaluation and a User Study of Telegram

The computer security community has advocated widespread adoption of secure communication tools to protect personal privacy. Several popular communication tools have adopted end-to-end encryption (e.g., WhatsApp, iMessage), or promoted security features as selling points (e.g., Telegram, Signal). However, previous studies have shown that users may not understand the security features of the tools they are using, and may not be using them correctly. In this paper, we present a study of Telegram using two complementary methods: (1) a labbased user study (11 novices and 11 Telegram users), and (2) a hybrid analytical approach combining cognitive walk-through and heuristic evaluation to analyse Telegram’s user interface. Participants who use Telegram feel secure because they feel they are using a secure tool, but in reality Telegram offers limited security benefits to most of its users. Most participants develop a habit of using the less secure default chat mode at all times. We also uncover several user interface design issues that impact security, including technical jargon, inconsistent use of terminology, and making some security features clear and others not. For instance, use of the end-to-end-encrypted Secret Chat mode requires both the sender and recipient be online at the same time, and Secret Chat does not support group conversations

A New Layout Method for Graphical User Interfaces

International audienceThe layout mechanisms for many GUI toolkits are hard to understand, the associated tools and API's often difficult to use. This work investigates new, easy-to-understand layout mechanisms and evaluates its implementation. We will analyze the requirements for the definition of layouts of a graphical user interface. Part of the issue is that several aspects need to be considered simultaneously while laying-out a component: the alignment with other components as well as its own behaviour while resizing its container. Moreover, the used tools should isolate the designer/drawer from the implementation details of the framework. We present the details of our new GUI layout system, discuss the choices we made for our new layout algorithm and detail implementation issues. Moreover, we present also the user interface for our new GUI builder system that contains several innovations, such as a preview window to show the effects of layout configuration choices in real-time. We present an evaluation of our new system by attacking the complex GUI layout problem mentioned above

Understanding and Evaluating User Interface Visibility

Technology dominates our lives, mobile technology in particular. In 2016 Apple sold their billionth iPhone. By 2018 they had sold their 2 billionth device based on the same underlying operating system. We access such technology through the user interface (UI) and concerns have been raised about the usability of such devices. The situation has been described by some as a “usability crisis”. One of the key issues raised is the lack of visibility of user interface elements, which is deemed to be a critical component of an effective UI. An initial investigation highlighted that UI visibility can be broken down into three key aspects: Firstly; some user interface elements are effectively ‘missing’; Secondly, they are ‘missed’ because they are not seen by the user; and thirdly, they are seen but ‘misunderstood’. Further analysis of the home screen of an iPhone revealed that only 8% of the available functions were visible at the top level, in other words, 92% were effectively ‘missing’. This raises key questions about how UI visibility can be evaluated, and such evaluation adopted into design practice. This research took a psychophysical perspective to better understand UI visibility. This led to the development of an evaluation framework and associated tool called vis-UI-lise. The tool represents UI visibility as a series of 5 hurdles between the user and the interface that have to be overcome for a successful interaction. This tool was applied to an everyday task on a mobile phone which resulted in highlighting a range of possible usability problems. Comparison of the predicted versus observed problems showed that the vis-UI-lise tool had predicted 74% of them, a score that compares well with other usability evaluation tools. A training and support package was also developed for the vis-UI-lise tool and evaluated with four different organisations. This provided key insights into how the tool could be improved to fit in with typical design practice. This thesis brings a new perspective to the understanding and evaluation of UI visibility that could have a real impact on the design of everyday user interfaces

An interface to retrieve personal memories using an iconic visual language

Relevant past events can be remembered when visualizing related pictures. The main difficulty is how to find these photos in a large personal collection. Query definition and image annotation are key issues to overcome this problem. The former is relevant due to the diversity of the clues provided by our memory when recovering a past moment and the later because images need to be annotated with information regarding those clues to be retrieved. Consequently, tools to recover past memories should deal carefully with these two tasks. This paper describes a user interface designed to explore pictures from personal memories. Users can query the media collection in several ways and for this reason an iconic visual language to define queries is proposed. Automatic and semi-automatic annotation is also performed using the image content and the audio information obtained when users show their images to others. The paper also presents the user interface evaluation based on tests with 58 participants

Mismatch between older adult's expectation and smartphone user interface

Smartphones have become ubiquitous communication tools for everybody, including older adults to stay connected with their family and access to information. However, mobile operators and developers mainly target the youngster cohort in mobile industry. With the rising ageing population, smartphone user interface and some mobile apps are not designed to cater the needs of older adults. This could hinder them from fully utilizing the smartphone functions and its services. A mobile-user interaction study using mixed-methods (questionnaire, interview and observation) was conducted to examine usability and user interface design issues of smartphone and mobile apps among 80 older adults in Malaysia. Four tasks design were ‘making voice calls’, ‘using phonebook’, ‘installing a mobile app from GooglePlay Store’, and ‘using WhatsApp’. The results were analysed both quantitatively (for usability evaluation) and qualitatively (for interviews and observation). The usability result revealed that the ‘voice call’ task had the highest success task completion rate (83.44%), followed by ‘phonebook’(70.16%), ‘mobile app download’(63.13%) and ‘using WhatsApp’ (60.42%). Three themes were emerged from the qualitative thematic analysis, which showed a mismatch between older adults’ expectation and smartphone user interface. A majority had never downloaded a mobile app before, and they had problems down loading it from Play Store. They perceived the Play Store feature as a place for children playing games. To close the discrepancy between user expectation and mobile design, the mobile designers and developers are required to consider the older adults’ needs for better usability of smartphone user interface design

Usability evaluation of a research repository and collaboration website

This article reports results from an empirical usability evaluation of Human-Animal Bond Research Initiative Central as part of the effort to develop an open access research repository and collaboration platform for human-animal bond researchers. By repurposing and altering key features of the original HUBzero system, Human-Animal Bond Research Initiative Central hosts previously published materials from related disciplines and an extensive bibliography, in addition to traditional hub materials such as tools and datasets. Seven graduate students in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Purdue University participated in the usability evaluation. Tasks included exploring the system, finding an article in the repository, submitting an article to the repository, adding bibliographic information of an article to the repository, and using interaction features such as user groups. Participants also answered open questions regarding their overall experience and rated Human-Animal Bond Research Initiative Central\u27s usability using the System Usability Scale. Response measures included task successfulness, navigational steps, task time, participant comments, and behavior notes recorded by the researcher. Results of the evaluation showed that the overall user experience of Human-Animal Bond Research Initiative Central was satisfactory but also indicated a number of usability issues. Participants had difficulty inputting metadata such as resource type and author information when submitting an article to the repository. There were also interface design issues regarding layout and consistency. It is expected that findings from this study and the evaluation methodology can be extended to the development and evaluation of similar research repository systems

User-Centric Deployment of Automated Program Repair at Bloomberg

Automated program repair (APR) tools have unlocked the potential for the rapid rectification of codebase issues. However, to encourage wider adoption of program repair in practice, it is necessary to address the usability concerns related to generating irrelevant or out-of-context patches. When software engineers are presented with patches they deem uninteresting or unhelpful, they are burdened with more "noise" in their workflows and become less likely to engage with APR tools in future. This paper presents a novel approach to optimally time, target, and present auto-generated patches to software engineers. To achieve this, we designed, developed, and deployed a new tool dubbed B-Assist, which leverages GitHub's Suggested Changes interface to seamlessly integrate automated suggestions into active pull requests (PRs), as opposed to creating new, potentially distracting PRs. This strategy ensures that suggestions are not only timely, but also contextually relevant and delivered to engineers most familiar with the affected code. Evaluation among Bloomberg software engineers demonstrated their preference for this approach. From our user study, B-Assist's efficacy is evident, with the acceptance rate of patch suggestions being as high as 74.56%; engineers also found the suggestions valuable, giving usefulness ratings of at least 4 out of 5 in 78.2% of cases. Further, this paper sheds light on persisting usability challenges in APR and lays the groundwork for enhancing the user experience in future APR tools