Action-Based Help Technique To Improve Learnability And Understandability Of Web Applications

The emergence of the Internet has created a tremendous demand for Web applications. Acceptability of Web applications is heavily dependent on its usability factor. A Web application is one of the platforms where users often experience frustration. This frustration accumulates once they encounter difficulties to learn and understand the functions after discovering the functions earlier. Learnability and understandability are two crucial factors of usability. Thus, it is a challenge for Web developers and designers to ensure that Web applications will continuously support users’ understanding and learning processes. This research focuses on improving the learnability and understandability of Web applications through an Action-Based Help (ABH) technique. The proposed technique has been designed to capture users’ interactions on a Graphical User Interface (GUI) in order to determine which of the functions that users require guidance. This technique also provides guidance through a help system that uses video demonstration and tooltip technology to enhance users understanding towards the functionality. A controlled experiment has been conducted to evaluate its effectiveness in enhancing users’ understanding towards Web functionalities. It was discovered that through the adoption of the proposed technique, users are able to understand the functions better compared to the textbased online help. Users also able to complete tasks given in shorter time and obtained lower frequency in help accesses compared with text-based online help

A Survey on Web Usage Mining, Applications and Tools

World Wide Web is a vast collection of unstructured web documents like text, images, audio, video or Multimedia content.  As web is growing rapidly with millions of documents, mining the data from the web is a difficult task. To mine various patterns from the web is known as Web mining. Web mining is further classified as content mining, structure mining and web usage mining. Web usage mining is the data mining technique to mine the knowledge of usage of web data from World Wide Web. Web usage mining extracts useful information from various web logs i.e. users usage history. This is useful for better understanding and serve the people for better web applications. Web usage mining not only useful for the people who access the documents from the World Wide Web, but also it useful for many applications like e-commerce to do personalized marketing, e-services, the government agencies to classify threats and fight against terrorism, fraud detection, to identify criminal activities, the companies can establish better customer relationship and can improve their businesses by analyzing the people buying strategies etc. This paper is going to explain in detail about web usage mining and how it is helpful. Web Usage Mining has seen rapid increase towards research and people communities

End-User Control In Web-Based Electronic Services: A Case Study

This paper reports a case study of end-user control in delivery of Web-based electronic services. The case study concentrates the adoption of a Web-based electronic system being implemented in processing student&rsquo;s admission applications on a Web site. The end-user&rsquo;s control interface provides information on the detail existing in the Web-based electronic service. This insight into end-user synthesis in developing effective control in Web service environment relates to ease of use in doing the task. To assume the leverage of end-user control strictly on the basis of the Web service usage would limit the purpose of understanding. Rather it is suggested that it would be better to develop an approach to study the end-user ease of use interface in doing the task with the user&rsquo;s perception towards Web-based interactivity.<br /

Applied Problems and Use of Technology in Basic Courses in Probability and Statistics : A Way to Enhance Understanding and Increase Motivation

Several authors have reported problems on service courses in basic probability and statistics: students may lack motivation, find the theory difficult or boring, others see no applications for the results. To remedy these problems we have developed a learning environment where two important components are applied problems and use of technology. However, the mere existence of applied problems and technology in the course does not automatically implyincreased motivation or enhanced learning. Technology is helpful for the students if it is used to achieve learning goals, is integrated with the needs of the students and is aligned with the rest of the course. Real-life data and problems evoke interest if the students perceive they benefit from the task. We give two examples, one where active work with applied exercises and projects give a more positive attitude towards the subject, the other example shows that aligned web-based test and exercises increase the result on the final exam and also indicate a better conceptual understanding

Analyse the risks of ad hoc programming in web development and develop a metrics of appropriate tools

Today the World Wide Web has become one of the most powerful tools for business promotion and social networking. As the use of websites and web applications to promote the businesses has increased drastically over the past few years, the complexity of managing them and protecting them from security threats has become a complicated task for the organizations. On the other hand, most of the web projects are at risk and less secure due to lack of quality programming. Although there are plenty of frameworks available for free in the market to improve the quality of programming, most of the programmers use ad hoc programming rather than using frameworks which could save their time and repeated work. The research identifies the different frameworks in PHP and .NET programming, and evaluates their benefits and drawbacks in the web application development. The research aims to help web development companies to minimize the risks involved in developing large web projects and develop a metrics of appropriate frameworks to be used for the specific projects. The study examined the way web applications were developed in different software companies and the advantages of using frameworks while developing them. The findings of the results show that it was not only the experience of developers that motivated them to use frameworks. The major conclusions and recommendations drawn from this research were that the main reasons behind web developers avoiding frameworks are that they are difficult to learn and implement. Also, the motivations factors for programmers towards using frameworks were self-efficiency, habit of learning new things and awareness about the benefits of frameworks. The research recommended companies to use appropriate frameworks to protect their projects against security threats like SQL injection and RSS injectio

Application of Web 2.0 technologies in e-government: A United Kingdom case study

Electronic government (e-Government) has endured significant transformation over the last decade and currently, it is making further leaps by incorporating modern technologies such as second generation web (Web 2.0) technologies. However, since the development and use of this kind of technology is still at its early stages in the public sector, research about the use of Web 2.0 in this domain is still highly tentative and lacks theoretical underpinning. This paper reports the preliminary findings of an in-depth case study in the United Kingdom (UK) public sector, which explore the application of Web 2.0 technologies in the local government authority (LGA). The findings elicited from the case study offer an insight into information systems (IS) evaluation criterions and impact factors of Web 2.0 from both a practical setting and an internal organisational perspective. This paper concludes that a combined analysis of the evaluation and impact factors rather than a singular approach would better assist the decision making process that leads to effective application of Web 2.0 technologies. It also highlights the significant impact and perceived effect of adoption of such technologies

A theoretical model for the application of Web 2.0 in e-Government

Government organisations in many countries have started embracing modern technologies such as second generation web (Web 2.0) in an attempt to maximize on the benefits of these technologies as well as keeping up with the current trend. Nevertheless, the advancement and the adoption of these of technologies is in its initial stages in the public sector. Therefore, the research problem is that the literature surrounding the application of Web 2.0 is still highly tentative and exploratory. In particular, there is a lack of research exploring the application of Web 2.0 technologies in the context of local e-Government. This study aims to address this research problem by presenting a comprehensive decision-making tool to aid the effective application of Web 2.0 technologies amongst local government authorities (LGAs). In doing so, resulting in the development of a theoretical model that is underpinned by information systems evaluation criteria and impact factors of Web 2.0 from an internal organizational perspective. By addressing the research problem, this study will make a significant contribution to the normative literature by providing new insights of Web 2.0 technologies within the public sector. This will be of specific relevance to scholars, policy makers, LGAs and practitioners who are interested in the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in an e-Government context. This paper presents the proposed theoretical model and is largely devoted to an explanation on the development of the model