Introducing New Methodologies for Identifying Design Patterns for Internationalization and Localization

This paper describes a new methodology for deriving interaction design patterns from an analysis of ethnographic data. It suggests using inductive and deductive analysis processes to identify and articulate patterns that address the needs of culturally diverse users of interactive, collaborative systems. This might inform the internationalization and localization process of computer supported collaboration systems

Applying a User-centred Approach to Interactive Visualization Design

Analysing users in their context of work and finding out how and why they use different information resources is essential to provide interactive visualisation systems that match their goals and needs. Designers should actively involve the intended users throughout the whole process. This chapter presents a user-centered approach for the design of interactive visualisation systems. We describe three phases of the iterative visualisation design process: the early envisioning phase, the global specification hase, and the detailed specification phase. The whole design cycle is repeated until some criterion of success is reached. We discuss different techniques for the analysis of users, their tasks and domain. Subsequently, the design of prototypes and evaluation methods in visualisation practice are presented. Finally, we discuss the practical challenges in design and evaluation of collaborative visualisation environments. Our own case studies and those of others are used throughout the whole chapter to illustrate various approaches

Impactful contributions of usability practitioners to open source software projects:a multiple case study

Abstract. Open source software (OSS) has been described as being designed by and for technically advanced users. As OSS has been gaining popularity among non-technical users, concern about its usability has been raised, as it is difficult for technically-minded developers to design for average users. Hiring usability experts to represent the needs of average users has been used in commercial software development as an effective solution for improving usability. It has been also suggested as a way of addressing the usability issues of OSS, but it has been observed that it is often difficult for usability experts to contribute to OSS so that their work has a major impact on the usability of the software. In this thesis, a multiple case study of four usability interventions was conducted. The cases were a part of a larger research program called UKKOSS, which aims to test ways how usability experts can meaningfully contribute to OSS by conducting usability interventions, where student teams act as usability practitioners who enter OSS projects and carry out usability work on them. This study examined how OSS developers reacted to four of those usability interventions by examining the data gathered during those interventions. The analysed data included documents, such as summary reports, communication logs, project plans, and reports on the conducted usability activities. The larger goal of studying these cases was to gather information on how usability practitioners can conduct impactful usability work on OSS projects. The outcomes of the cases were examined through the lens of prior research, and the factors that may have contributed to the success of the cases were examined through cross-case analysis. The developers welcomed the usability work of the usability teams in generally all of the four cases, but the actual impacts the interventions had varied from none of the suggested usability changes being implemented to most of them being implemented to the software. The outcomes of the most successful cases suggest that an approach where usability practitioners implement their suggested changes themselves after discussing about them with the core developers, establishing trust with the developers by contacting them via voice call or video conferencing instead of using only asynchronous communication, and making usability reports as persuasive as possible by including user testing metrics which strengthen the validity of the issues, should be studied further to evaluate if they can have a positive effect on the impact of the work of usability practitioners. The main contributions of this research were supporting the prior research on the obstacles faced by usability experts entering OSS projects by supporting it with empirical evidence and proposing new areas of research on the subject based on the outcomes of the cases

Usability evaluation of a prototype design tool for uncertainty propagation and sensitivity analysis

Software developments in the domain of building performance simulation (BPS) targeting the early design stages of a building need to address two points successfully to be adopted in design practice: (1) facilitating communication between multiple engineering disciplines and (2) the limited amount of design information. The authors consider the limited amount of design information available not as a limit but as a design uncertainty. To focus the designer’s attention the approach chosen here is to extend the capabilities of existing simulation tools with uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. The development of software goes as any product development through stages as design, synthesis and analysis and involves numerous design iterations. The analysis of the prototypical tool extension includes verification und usability evaluation. Whilst the verification of prototypical design tools is necessary to ensure the added analysis functionality is implemented correctly the usability evaluation is to ensure the proposed feature meets the demand of the potential user group. A heuristic usability evaluation was conducted with six expert practitioners using a paper prototype. The quantitative feedback to heuristics as design guidance, process integration, and application confirmed the potential of the tool extension to support design practice. The usability evaluation indicated that expert practitioners would encourage the use of uncertainty propagation and sensitivity analysis if tool extensions to BPS-tools were available. The experts assess uncertainty propagation and sensitivity analysis to add value by reducing the risk of technical design decisions and limiting the extent of design iterations

Methodological development

Book description: Human-Computer Interaction draws on the fields of computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and organisational and social sciences in order to understand how people use and experience interactive technology. Until now, researchers have been forced to return to the individual subjects to learn about research methods and how to adapt them to the particular challenges of HCI. This is the first book to provide a single resource through which a range of commonly used research methods in HCI are introduced. Chapters are authored by internationally leading HCI researchers who use examples from their own work to illustrate how the methods apply in an HCI context. Each chapter also contains key references to help researchers find out more about each method as it has been used in HCI. Topics covered include experimental design, use of eyetracking, qualitative research methods, cognitive modelling, how to develop new methodologies and writing up your research

Evaluating the usability of a visual feature modeling notation

International audienceFeature modeling is a popular Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) technique used to describe variability in a product family. A usable feature modeling tool environment should enable SPLE practitioners to produce good quality models, in particular, models that effectively communicate modeled information. FAMILIAR is a text-based environment for manipulating and composing Feature Models (FMs). In this paper we present extensions we made to FAMILIAR to enhance its usability. The extensions include a visualization of FMs, or more precisely , a feature diagram rendering mechanism that supports the use of a combination of text and graphics to describe FMs, their configurations, and the results of FM analyses. We also present the results of a preliminary evaluation of the environment's usability. The evaluation involves comparing the use of the extended environment with the previous text-based console-driven version. The preliminary experiment provides some evidence that use of the new environment results in increased cognitive effectiveness of novice users and improved quality of new FMs

Spiraling Toward Usability: An Integrated Design Environment and Management System

Decades of innovation in designing usable (and unusable) interfaces have resulted in a plethora of guidelines, usability engineering methods, and other design tools. However, novice developers often have difficulty selecting and utilizing theory-based design tools in a coherent design process. This work introduces an integrated design environment and knowledge management system, LINK-UP. The central design record (CDR) module, provides tools to enable a guided, coherent development process. The CDR aims to prevent breakdowns occurring between design and evaluation phases both within the development team and during design knowledge reuse processes. We report on results from three case studies illustrating novice designers use of LINK-UP. A design knowledge IDE incorporating a CDR can help novice developers craft interfaces in a methodical fashion, while applying, verifying, and producing reusable design knowledge. Although LINK-UP supports a specific design domain, our IDE approach can transfer to other domains