Current Practices for Product Usability Testing in Web and Mobile Applications

Software usability testing is a key methodology that ensures applications are intuitive and easy to use for the target audience. Usability testing has direct benefits for companies as usability improvements often are fundamental to the success of a product. A standard usability test study includes the following five steps: obtain suitable participants, design test scripts, conduct usability sessions, interpret test outcomes, and produce recommendations. Due to the increasing importance for more usable applications, effective techniques to develop usable products, as well as technologies to improve usability testing, have been widely utilized. However, as companies are developing more cross-platform web and mobile apps, traditional single-platform usability testing has shortcomings with respect to ensuring a uniform user experience. In this report, a new strategy is proposed to promote a consistent user experience across all application versions and platforms. This method integrates the testing of different application versions, e.g., the website, mobile app, mobile website. Participants are recruited with a better-defined criterion according to their preferred devices. The usability session is conducted iteratively on several different devices, and the test results of individual application versions are compared on a per-device basis to improve the test outcomes. This strategy is expected to extend on current practices for usability testing by incorporating cross-platform consistency of software versions on most devices

Consumer Satisfaction With Packaging Materials: Kano Model Analysis Approach

Packaging can play a significant role in a purchasing decision. Packaging material is one of the most important components of packaging design. It can create an initial impression that may generate an opinion regarding the product\u27s attributes. Despite a significant research focus on packaging, there is a lack of findings related to the consumers\u27 perception of packaging materials. This paper investigates the influence of packaging materials on consumers\u27 perception of product quality according to the Kano model of attributes classification. We used products from the current market which consumers use in daily life and can be commonly found on store shelves. The paper examined 14 quality attributes of different packaging materials using five-level Kano questionnaires. The results indicated that the attributes of particular packaging materials have an effect on the consumers\u27 product choice. In addition, the results demonstrate that the attributes classified as attractive or one-dimensional have a strong impact on the consumers\u27 satisfaction

Image based indonesian fruit recognition using MPEG-7 color structure descriptor and k-nearest neighbor

Image based fruit recognition can be applied in several sectors including food industry, food retail, and medical. This paper proposes a method to recognize Indonesian fruit from image. The method uses MPEG-7 Color Structure Descriptor (CSD) as input features to k-nearest neighbor classifier. CSD describes the local color structure of image in HMMD (Hue, Max, Min, and Difference) color space. In this study, the numbers of features extracted from a fruit image were 32, 64, 128, and 256. A simple feature selection method based on variance has been applied to reduce the dimension of input features and to increase classification performance. A feature with variance less than predefined threshold was excluded from feature space. Three hundred and fifty images from seven types of Indonesian fruit have been used to validate the proposed method using 10-fold cross validation. The experimental result showed that the best classification accuracy of 90.86% was achieved using 256 features of CSD combined with feature selection

Food Watch: Helping People to Live a Healthy Life

Food is one of the great pleasures of life. However, due to cultural backgrounds and physical conditions, the same food is not suitable for all consumers. Peanuts, dairy products, and wheat can be deadly for people with food allergies. These consumers must carefully check the ingredients of all of their food. This article outlines a system that combines product labeling and mobile technology to help those with food allergies and food intolerances easily manage their diet and protect their health. With this new system, a user with dietary restrictions only needs to scan a label barcode with a mobile phone app to quickly assess a food product’s appropriateness for their needs. This system not only provides users with a functional, time-saving solution, it will also provide peace of mind to improve their quality of life

Optimizing inventory levels using financial, lifecycle and forecast variance data

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; in conjunction with the Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 47-48).Significant inventory write-offs have recently plagued ATI Technologies, a world leader in graphics and media processors. ATI's product-centric culture has long deterred attention from supply chain efficiency. Given that manufacturing lead time exceeds customer order lead time for its semiconductors, ATI relies heavily on their demand forecasting team to instigate supply chain activities. The PC business unit forecasting team translates market information into product-line forecast and also sets finished goods inventory levels intended to offset demand uncertainty. Today's inventory decisions are made in response to customer escalations, often ignoring financial implications. To add necessary rigor when setting these inventory levels, this thesis presents a model using wafer and unit cost, profit margin, product lifecycle stage and historical forecast error to categorize products into inventory risk levels. The resultant risk levels become a critical input to monthly demand-supply meetings with marketing, operations and senior executives - the outcome of which are wafer orders and assembly and test plans at the world's largest contract foundries and subcontractors. Finally, the 2006 acquisition of ATI by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) offers unforeseen flexibility, scale and challenges to the outsourced semiconductor supply chain.by Irene S. Hwang.S.M.M.B.A

Human Factors and New Driver Interfaces: Lessons Learned from a Major Research

ABSTRACT This paper provides a project overview and summarizes the general lessons learned from a major research project on driver information systems. Emphasized are lessons that transcend experiments and have programmatic impact for project managers and sponsors. The goals of the project were to develop (1) human factors guidelines, (2) methods for examining the safety and ease of use of driver interfaces, and (3) a driver performance model. Five systems (navigation, traffic information, road hazard warning, vehicle monitoring, and car phones) were examined in 20 experiments. Experiments included surveys at driver licensing offices, response time tasks, driving simulator studies, part-task simulations, and on-the-road evaluations. A major group of lessons concerned how realistic, inexpensive, and rapidly-produced interface prototypes can be, and how to achieve a high level of fidelity. (Use SuperCard and HyperCard to develop them. Have prototypes operated surreptitiously by experimenters in response to real world events (the Wizard of Oz method).) Of the methods explored, there were lessons concerning focus groups (ineffective for products beyond participant experience), response time tasks (use them to evaluate display readability) and usefulness of the subjects-in-tandem method (in which pairs of subject collaborate in using a product). The research provided several lessons concerning the inadequacies of low-fidelity driving simulators (unsatisfactory estimates of driving performance, sign legibility inadequate for route guidance assessments, numerous problems with videotape-based simulations). Lessons from the on-the-road evaluations related to test vehicle shake down (extensive time is needed), and determining workload (for comparable test conditions) and data reduction. (New methods are needed in both cases.) During these evaluations, design guidelines emerged from interface design decisions (the preferred approach), not from a summary of the literature. General guidelines and principles (especially consistency), proved very useful in design. PROJECT OVERVIEW This paper summarizes a four-year project on driver interfaces for motor vehicles of the future sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). This topic includes controls and displays with which the driver interacts, as well as the information presentation logic and sequencing. The project had three objectives

Industry liaison section implementation plan

The Industry Liaison Section is a new function of the Army/NASA Aircrew-Aircraft Integration (AAAI) Program that is intended to bridge an existing gap between Government developers (including contractors) and outside organizations who are potential users of products and services developed by the AAAI Program. Currently in its sixth year, the Program is experiencing considerable pull from industry and other government organizations to disseminate products. Since the AAAI Program's charter is exploratory and research in nature, and satisfying proper dissemination requirements is in conflict with the rapid prototyping approach utilized by the design team, the AAAI Program has elected to create an Industry Liaison Section (ILS) to serve as the Program's technology transfer focal point. The process by which the ILS may be established, organized and managed is described, including the baseline organizational structure, duties, functions, authority, responsibilities, relations and policies and procedures relevant to the conduct of the ILS

Design and implementation of a web interface for Axis global testing Live Sites

Designing and developing a software product is a difficult process. The product must be usable and solve the correct problem. At the same time, the underlying code must be well written. Many projects fail to deliver or exceed their budget. This thesis explores a practical approach to software design and development that tries to adhere to both user centered design and agile development. The process follows Google Ventures’ design sprint model and also takes inspiration from Jacob Nielsen's discount usability methods. This approach is applied to a real project at Axis Communications. The goal of the project was to design and implement a web application for monitoring and analyzing data from Axis global weather testing ``Live Sites''. The data was collected and analyzed manually which was a very time consuming process. It was difficult to interact with the data in order to see correlations between the weather and the camera images. We were able design a solution to this and implement it during four iterations. Each iteration consisted of a design sprint, an implementation sprint and an evaluation phase. The design sprints were fast and effective, which meant we could spend more time on building the actual product while still being confident that we were building something that would actually work. Through continuous usability evaluation and regular stakeholder meetings we were able to validate our design. The project resulted in a web application consisting of a number of interactive dashboards. Our conclusion is that the resulting interface solves the problem of interacting with the ``Live Site'' data and should provide a good foundation to build upon. We also conclude that Google Ventures' design sprint is a powerful and effective model which could be of great benefit to software development projects.Is it possible to create usable software quickly and effectively? To find out, we combined practices of good usability design and fast software development in a project at Axis Communications. Developing usable software is no simple task. The software must be well designed and solve a real problem for its users. At the same time the software’s inner workings must be engineered in a good way. Preferably, the process of producing this software should be fast and cost effective. Many software projects fail, either by delivering an unusable product or by going over budget. In our master thesis we explored a practical approach to software design and coding that tries to solve these issues. We applied this approach to a software project at Axis Communications. Our task was to develop a website for Axis global testing live sites. These live sites are physical sites located around the world in different climate zones. Each site consists of a number of Axis cameras and a weather station connected to a local server. The cameras are left there so that the physical impact of the environment can be monitored and studied. By doing this Axis makes sure that their cameras are able to handle harsh weather conditions in the real world, not just in controlled test chambers. Our approach was to divide the project into four repetitions, each consisting of a design phase, a coding phase, and a usability evaluation phase. During the design phase, which lasted for five days, we tried to solve design issues. We conducted interviews with the users and had observations sessions on day one. Solutions to the discovered problems were explored in day two. On day three we combined our ideas into a single solution. During day four we made a prototype of this solution. The usability of this prototype was tested on real users at Axis on the fifth and final day. The coding phase lasted two to three weeks and took us from a design prototype to a working website. The usability of the website was evaluated and we brought the newly discovered problems with us to the next repetition. Throughout our project we used this approach to solve design problems at an astonishing pace. By incorporating the design phase into a repetitive process we were able to produce a working product very quickly, which we could continuously add and improve upon. The process resulted in a usable product, but we were sadly not able to fully implement our envisioned solution. We do however believe that by following our process model we were able to not only produce good design, but also well written code. Hopefully this means that the product can be built upon and eventually fully realized. The process model turned out to be a powerful and effective tool. Despite the fact that we couldn’t completely evade the problem of going over budget, we think it could be of great benefit to the software engineering process

Exploring the motivation behind cybersecurity insider threat and proposed research agenda

Cyber exploitation and malicious activities have become more sophisticated. Insider threat is one of the most significant cyber security threat vector, while posing a great concern to corporations and governments. An overview of the fundamental motivating forces and motivation theory are discussed. Such overview is provided to identify motivations that lead trusted employees to become insider threats in the context of cyber security. A research agenda with two sequential experimental research studies are outlined to address the challenge of insider threat mitigation by a prototype development. The first proposed study will classify data intake feeds, as recognized and weighted by cyber security experts, in an effort to establish predictive analytics of novel correlations of activities that may lead to cyber security incidents. It will also develop approach to identify how user activities can be compared against an established baseline, the user’s network cyber security pulse, with visualization of simulated users’ activities. Additionally, the second study will explain the process of assessing the usability of a developed visualization prototype that intends to present correlated suspicious activities requiring immediate action. Successfully developing the proposed prototype via feeds aggregation and an advanced visualization from the proposed research could assist in the mitigation of malicious insider threat