I-pot: a new approach utilising visual and contextual cues to support users in graphical web browser revisitation.

With a quarter of the world’s population now having access to the internet, the area of web efficiency and optimal use is of growing importance to all users. The function of revisitation, where a user wants to return to a website that they have visited in the recent past becomes more important. Current static and textual approaches developed within the latest versions of mainstream web browsers leave much to be desired. This paper suggests a new approach via the use of organic visual and contextual cues to support users in this task area

How people recognize previously seen Web pages from titles, URLs and thumbnails

The selectable lists of pages offered by web browsers ’ history and bookmark facilities ostensibly make it easier for people to return to previously visited pages. These lists show the pages as abstractions, typically as truncated titles and URLs, and more rarely as small thumbnail images. Yet we have little knowledge of how recognizable these representations really are. Consequently, we carried out a study that compared the recognizability of thumbnails between various image sizes, and of titles and URLs between various string sizes. Our results quantify the tradeoff between the size of these representations and their recognizability. These findings directly contribute to how history and bookmark lists should be designed

Suunnitteluohjeen kehittäminen kognitiivisen ergonomian huomioimiseen käytettävyyden parantamisessa

Today, it is almost impossible to avoid interaction with IT-related tools. Therefore, when designing systems, it is important to consider people’s cognitive abilities and limitations to avoid production errors and excessive burden on people. In cognitive ergonomics, the interaction between humans and technology is studied and designed especially from the viewpoint of human cognitive processes. Cognitive ergonomics aims to shorten task times, reduce mistakes made by people, shorten learning times, and improve people’s satisfaction with the systems. Cognitive ergonomics can be considered as an important scientific basis for user interface design. In this study, the aim is to find out how the system’s usability can be affected by improving cognitive ergonomics. The study was conducted using the design science research approach in the context of the technology industry. The human-centered design viewpoint of technology is increasingly important in the industry context as the number of IT-related tools grows. In the study, the usability of the target company’s SAP ME system was improved with a focus on the aspects of cognitive ergonomics. As a manifestation of the research’s aim, an IT artifact, i.e., design instructions for improving usability from the viewpoint of cognitive ergonomics, was created.© VAKKI and the authors 2023. This work is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Full Text and Figure Display Improves Bioscience Literature Search

When reading bioscience journal articles, many researchers focus attention on the figures and their captions. This observation led to the development of the BioText literature search engine [1], a freely available Web-based application that allows biologists to search over the contents of Open Access Journals, and see figures from the articles displayed directly in the search results. This article presents a qualitative assessment of this system in the form of a usability study with 20 biologist participants using and commenting on the system. 19 out of 20 participants expressed a desire to use a bioscience literature search engine that displays articles' figures alongside the full text search results. 15 out of 20 participants said they would use a caption search and figure display interface either frequently or sometimes, while 4 said rarely and 1 said undecided. 10 out of 20 participants said they would use a tool for searching the text of tables and their captions either frequently or sometimes, while 7 said they would use it rarely if at all, 2 said they would never use it, and 1 was undecided. This study found evidence, supporting results of an earlier study, that bioscience literature search systems such as PubMed should show figures from articles alongside search results. It also found evidence that full text and captions should be searched along with the article title, metadata, and abstract. Finally, for a subset of users and information needs, allowing for explicit search within captions for figures and tables is a useful function, but it is not entirely clear how to cleanly integrate this within a more general literature search interface. Such a facility supports Open Access publishing efforts, as it requires access to full text of documents and the lifting of restrictions in order to show figures in the search interface

How users assess web pages for information-seeking

In this paper, we investigate the criteria used by online searchers when assessing the relevance of web pages for information-seeking tasks. Twenty four participants were given three tasks each, and indicated the features of web pages which they employed when deciding about the usefulness of the pages in relation to the tasks. These tasks were presented within the context of a simulated work-task situation. We investigated the relative utility of features identified by participants (web page content,structure and quality), and how the importance of these features is affected by the type of information-seeking task performed and the stage of the search. The results of this study provide a set of criteria used by searchers to decide about the utility of web pages for different types of tasks. Such criteria can have implications for the design of systems that use or recommend web pages

The design of 3D cyberspace as user interface: Advantages and limitations

Virtual reality propagandists, technologists and the Internet community have long debated the issue of the usability of online three-dimensional (3D) environments. A lot of work was published about the benefits of 3D spaces for human-computer interaction and information visualisation due to their realism (Anders, Kalawsky, Crossley, Davies, McGrath, Rejman-Greene, 1998, Hamit, 1993, Heim, 1992, Aukstakalnis, Blatner, Roth, 1992). This topic also receives continuous industry support including standardisation of Virtual Reality Modeling Language ( VRML, VRML Consortium, 1997) and the more recent Macromedia & Intel alliance to bring web 3D to the mainstream (200 1, Intel Corporation). The actual implementation of this technology is, however, still challenging (McCarthy & Descartes, 1998) and minimal because 3D is too new and waiting for good design to be discovered (Nielsen, 1998). The practical aim of this project is to fulfil the niche by creating a functional 3D interface for the access of two-dimensional (2D) information, such as text, using VRML. The theoretical aim is to contribute to further research into 3D usability by describing and analysing the design process in terms of possibilities, challenges and limitations