Understanding the fidelity effect when evaluating games with children

There have been a number of studies that have compared evaluation results from prototypes of different fidelities but very few of these are with children. This paper reports a comparative study of three prototypes ranging from low fidelity to high fidelity within the context of mobile games, using a between subject design with 37 participants aged 7 to 9. The children played a matching game on either an iPad, a paper prototype using screen shots of the actual game or a sketched version. Observational data was captured to establish the usability problems, and two tools from the Fun Toolkit were used to measure user experience. The results showed that there was little difference for user experience between the three prototypes and very few usability problems were unique to a specific prototype. The contribution of this paper is that children using low-fidelity prototypes can effectively evaluate games of this genre and style

Aberdeen University Ontology Reuse Stack

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PLU-E: a proposed framework for planning and conducting evaluation studies with children.

While many models exist to support the design process of a software development project, the evaluation process is far less well defined and this lack of definition often leads to poorly designed evaluations, or the use of the wrong evaluation method. Evaluations of products for children can be especially complex as they need to consider the different requirements and aims that such a product may have, and often use new or developing evaluation methods. This paper takes the view that evaluations should be planned from the start of a project in order to yield the best results, and proposes a framework to facilitate this. This framework is particularly intended to support the varied and often conflicting requirements of a product designed for children, as defined by the PLU model, but could be adapted for other user groups

Mobile application usability heuristics: Decoupling context-of-use

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG. All rights are reserved by the Publisher. This is the accepted manuscript version of a conference paper which has been published in final form at ttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58634-2_30Context-of-use is a vital consideration when evaluating the usability of mobile applications. Thus, when defining sets of heuristics for the usability evaluation of mobile applications, a common practice has been to include one or more heuristics that consider context-of-use. Yet, most evaluations are conducted within usability labs. Consequently, the aim of this research is to question the utility of attempting to include inherently complex areas of context-of-use within limited sets of mobile application usability heuristics. To address this, a mapping study uncovered six sets of heuristics that can be applied to mobile application usability evaluations. A within-subjects empirical test with six Human-Computer Interaction practitioners evaluated a well-known travel mobile application using three sets of the mapped heuristics. The study found that the common practice of including context-of-use within mobile application usability heuristics is an ineffective approach

Establishing usability heuristics for heuristics evaluation in a specific domain: is there a consensus?

Heuristics evaluation is frequently employed to evaluate usability. While general heuristics are suitable to evaluate most user interfaces, there is still a need to establish heuristics for specific domains to ensure that their specific usability issues are identified. This paper presents a comprehensive review of 70 studies related to usability heuristics for specific domains. The aim of this paper is to review the processes that were applied to establish heuristics in specific domains and identify gaps in order to provide recommendations for future research and area of improvements. The most urgent issue found is the deficiency of validation effort following heuristics proposition and the lack of robustness and rigour of validation method adopted. Whether domain specific heuristics perform better or worse than general ones is inconclusive due to lack of validation quality and clarity on how to assess the effectiveness of heuristics for specific domains. The lack of validation quality also affects effort in improving existing heuristics for specific domain as their weaknesses are not addressed

Privacy and Usability of Image and Text Based Challenge Questions Authentication in Online Examination

In many online examinations, physical invigilation is often replaced with traditional authentication approaches for student identification. Secure and usable authentication approaches are important for high stake online examinations. A Profile Based Authentication Framework (PBAF) was developed and implemented in a real online learning course embedded with summative online examination. Based on users’ experience of using the PBAF in an online course, online questionnaires were used to collect participants' feedback on effectiveness, layout and appearance, user satisfaction, distraction and privacy concerns. Based on overall findings of the quantitative analysis, there was a positive feedback on the use of a hybrid approach utilizing image and text based challenge questions for better usability. However, the number of questions presented during learning and examination processes were reported to be too many and caused distraction. Participants expressed a degree of concern on sharing personal and academic information with little or no privacy concern on using favorite question

Extending and Refining Usability Heuristics to Better Address User Centered Design Issues in the Development and Evaluation of Municipal Websites

Usability of public administration websites is a key issue in the information society. Unfortunately, the web content is still difficult to use if not unusable in many websites. Developers seem to neglect basic principles of user centered design. Usability heuristics are valuable resources for both developers and evaluators during and after the development process. The purpose of this work is to extend and refine an existing set of heuristics in order to better address some user centered design issues. Previous studies revealed specific usability problems of municipal websites as well as some evaluation issues. Two heuristics were added that refer to user guidance and task support. The revised heuristics could better help evaluators to explain and developers to understand usability problems in municipal websites

FRIDA, a Framework for Software Design, Applied in the Treatment of Children with Autistic Disorder.

The “FRIDA” framework is a guide for the agile development of accessible software for users with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), as a tool for strengthening emotional and social skills in the treatment of autism. It is based on the use of accessible software for the development of emotional and social skills, and designed with a focus on the user with intellectual disabilities. A mixed quasi-experimental study is carried out with three focus groups: children with ASD, expert therapists in ASD treatments and software designers adapting the Design Thinking model for the co-creation of the functional characteristics of the software and its use in therapies. The findings and results show that using FRIDA facilitates the agile design of accessible apps by reducing their development time by 94% and increasing their usability level by more than 90%. This facilitates the treatment of people with ASD, especially in the development of emotional self-recognition skills and social adaptation. The experience applied collaborative design thinking models and agile software design methodologies, articulating knowledge between software developers, therapists, and families of users with ASD. Users were characterized separately, and the functionalities required for the software that would be developed and linked in the treatment of autism were identified.post-print5958 K

A geo-temporal information extraction service for processing descriptive metadata in digital libraries

In the context of digital map libraries, resources are usually described according to metadata records that define the relevant subject, location, time-span, format and keywords. On what concerns locations and time-spans, metadata records are often incomplete or they provide information in a way that is not machine-understandable (e.g. textual descriptions). This paper presents techniques for extracting geotemporal information from text, using relatively simple text mining methods that leverage on a Web gazetteer service. The idea is to go from human-made geotemporal referencing (i.e. using place and period names in textual expressions) into geo-spatial coordinates and time-spans. A prototype system, implementing the proposed methods, is described in detail. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approaches