Interaction design & Usability from an Indian perspective - Talks with: Apala Chavan, Anirudha Joshi, Dinesh Katre, Devashish Pandya, Sammeer Chabukswar, Pradeep Yammiyavar

This is a collection of talks on usability and culture with prominent researchers and practitioners on the Indian interaction design and usability scene: Apala Chavan, Anirudha Joshi, Dinesh Katre, Devashish Pandya, Sammeer Chabukswar, and Pradeep Yammiyavar. I did these talks because for several years I have been the coordinator of a cross cultural research project in India, China and Denmark that aims at investigating the impact of culture on the results of established methods of usability testing. During these years I gradually have come to realize the need for letting the prominent researchers and practitioners in the Indian software industry and university world speak about the big questions in the field. Without this grand context, it is in fact impossible to understand what research experiments will tell us about interaction design and usability in India and abroad. Therefore I first give an introduction to cultural usability and then present the six talks

Learning HCI Across Institutions, Disciplines and Countries: A Field Study of Cognitive Styles in Analytical and Creative Tasks

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is increasingly becoming a subject taught in universities around the world. However, little is known of the interactions of the HCI curriculum with students in different types of institutions and disciplines internationally. In order to explore these interactions, we studied the performance of HCI students in design, technology and business faculties in universities in UK, India, Namibia, Mexico and China who participated in a common set of design and evaluation tasks. We obtained participants’ cognitive style profiles based on Allinson and Hayes scale in order to gain further insights into their learning styles and explore any relation between these and performance. We found participants’ cognitive style preferences to be predominantly in the adaptive range, i.e. with combined analytical and intuitive traits, compared to normative data for software engineering, psychology and design professionals. We further identified significant relations between students’ cognitive styles and performance in analytical and creative tasks of a HCI professional individual. We discuss the findings in the context of the distinct backgrounds of the students and universities that participated in this study and the value of research that explores and promotes diversity in HCI education

Making Usable Generic Software. A Matter of Global or Local Design?

Usability is widely acknowledged as a desirable trait of software, referring to how usable it is to a specific set of users. However, when software is developed as generic packages, aimed at supporting variety, designing user interfaces with sufficient sensitivity to use-contexts is a challenge. Extant literature has documented this challenge and established that solving usability-related problems are difficult, both during software development and implementation. Adding to this discussion, this paper contributes by developing a framework to analyze what characterizes usability-related design of generic software. This includes two levels of design; generic-level and implementation-level, and two types of design; design for use and design for design. We apply this conceptual framework on an empirical case based on an ongoing action research project where a global generic health software is implemented in a large state in India. From the analysis we argue that attempts to strengthen usability of generic software require a holistic intervention, considering design on both ‘global’ and ‘local’ level. Of particular importance is how usable the generic software and other design-resources are when implementers are customizing the software. We coin this aspect of design as meta-usability, which represent what we see as an avenue for further research

A case study on smart band

학위논문 (석사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 산업공학과, 2020. 8. 윤명환 .The aim of this study is to prove that the consumer review-based text mining methods proposed in the paper for cross-cultural design are effective. To prove it, we took Mi band 3 as a case study where we compared the cross-cultural differences in product preference of users from different cultural regions with this method. With the development of global market, more and more products and services are sold across the globe. Users from different cultures have different behaviors, cognitive styles, and value systems. Therefore, product should be designed to meet the needs and preferences of users from different cultural groups. In the field of cross-cultural design, existing studies are mainly focused on traditional usability and UX research methods. However, these methods expose some disadvantages when applied into cross-cultural design contexts. E-commerce websites provide a large volume of product reviews and it is easy to collect review data online. There is no need to employ foreign participants or make a survey onsite or remotely, which will save much more cost and time. There is a new trend that customer reviews are examined to know consumer opinions. Neverlessness, there are not many studies by analyzing online reviews in the field of cross-cultural design. Thus, my research proposed consumer review-based text mining methods for cross-cultural design, which consist of aspect-level opinion mining, sentiment analysis, and semantic network analysis. We collected review data from the following three websites: Naver of South Korea, Jingdong of China, and Amazon of the United States. Text mining methods including opinion mining, sentiment analysis, and semantic network analysis were performed. Firstly, product aspects were extracted from reviews according to word frequency. This indicates how much users are paying attention to different aspects of the product. Aspect-level sentiment analysis was conducted to find out customer satisfaction with different product aspects. Then, the words most associated with each product aspect were listed. Cluster analysis was conducted and the topic of each cluster was summarized. Data visualization of each dataset was done. Lastly, cross-cultural difference among three countries from the results was observed and discussed. Though there exist similar issues in product preferences of users from South Korea, China, and the United States, cross-cultural differences about Mi band 3 are shown in many product aspects. Korean tend to take Mi band as a fashionable, cool, yet not useful wearable device. They often buy it as a nice gift. They are interested in the appearance of the strap and often buy straps of different colors and materials. Korean do not enjoy outdoor activities as much as American. And the function of NFC is not prevalent in Korea. Thus, the smart band is not useful to Korean. These can explain why Korean do not care about quality of the smart band and do not want to buy Mi band at a high price. Korean think that the language of Korean on the display, application, and manual is the most important feature. The length of Korean texts is longer than Chinese to convey the same information. On the other hand, Korean prefer to check message notification on smart band rather than call notification. Therefore, Korean need a larger size for screen. Chinese are more concerned about different kinds of functions including fitness tracker (step counting, heart rate monitoring, and sleep monitoring), notification, and NFC. These different functions are all important and practical to Chinese. American enjoy outdoor activities and tend to use smart band mostly as activity tracker. They care more about activity tracker function including heart rate monitoring and step counting than Korean and Chinese. They have a higher requirement about the accuracy of measured data and have more negative reviews on activity tracker function than Korean and Chinese. Besides, they need the mode for swimming. Because American usually use the smart band for outdoor activities, they complain a lot that the screen is prone to scratches and is invisible under the outdoor sunlight. Also, they pay attention to the quality of screen and strap, expecting the material make the screen and strap durable. Besides, battery is the most significant aspect to American. They always try to test each function to find which function makes battery life short. The results of the case study prove that the consumer review-based text mining method proposed in the paper can generate cross-cultural difference in product preference effectively, which is helpful to cross-cultural design research. And this method is relatively easy and fast compared to other conventional methods.Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Background and Motivation 1 1.2 Research Objective 3 1.3 Organization of the Thesis 4 Chapter 2. Literature Review 5 2.1 Cross-Cultural Design 5 2.1.1 Definition 5 2.1.2 Necessity 6 2.1.3 Method 7 2.2 Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis 10 2.2.1 Aspect Level Opinion Mining 10 2.2.2 Cross-Lingual Opinion Mining 11 2.3 Semantic Network Analysis 13 Chapter 3. Methodology 15 3.1 Data Collection 15 3.2 Data Processing 16 3.2.1 Text Preprocessing 16 3.2.2 Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis 16 3.2.3 Semantic Network Analysis 17 3.2.4 Result Sample 18 Chapter 4. Result 20 4.1 Overview 20 4.2 Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis 21 4.2.1 Normalized Frequency 21 4.2.2 Sentiment Analysis 23 4.3 Semantic Network Analysis 26 4.3.1 Associated Words 26 4.3.1 Cluster Analysis 31 4.3.1 Data Visualization 34 4.4 Results based on Aspects 37 4.4.1 Battery 37 4.4.2 Price 39 4.4.3 Function 41 4.4.4 Step Counting 43 4.4.5 Korean 45 4.4.6 Heart Rate Monitoring 47 4.4.7 Sleep Monitoring 49 4.4.8 Quality 51 4.4.9 Notification 53 4.4.10 Screen 55 4.4.11 Exercise 57 4.4.12 App 59 4.4.13 Call 61 4.4.14 Connection 63 4.4.15 Waterproof 65 4.4.16 Display 67 4.4.17 Message 69 4.4.18 Alarm 71 4.4.19 Gift 73 4.4.20 Strap 75 Chapter 5. Conclusion 78 5.1 Summary of Findings 78 5.2 Future Research 80 Bibliography 82Maste

Laboratory investigation of stone matrix asphalt using bagasse fiber

Stone matrix asphalt (SMA) is a gap graded mix which contains a high concentration of coarse aggregate which are held together by a rich matrix of mineral filler, fiber or polymer as stabilizers in a thick asphalt film. SMA uses a structural basis of stone to stone contact in the mix by utilizing high concentration of coarse aggregates and thus provides an efficient network for load distribution. The rich mortar binder provides durability. Cellulose fibers, mineral fibers or polymers are added to SMA mixtures as stabilizing agent to prevent drain downof the mix. These structural characteristics makes SMA to maximize deformation resistance or rutting, provides durability and longevity in the service life of the pavements. In this project an attempt is being made to study the engineering behavior ofmixtures of stone matrix asphalt with a non-conventional natural waste fiber, namely sugarcane fiber which is a waste product after extraction of juice from sugarcane fiber. To achieve this various samples of SMA mixtures with and without fibers with different binder content were prepared. Marshall Properties were used to determine the optimum binder content .Thereafter other properties such as the drain down characteristics, static indirect tensile strength parameters were determined. The MORTH specifies t addition of only 0.3% fiber, use of which has shown significant improvement in the stability, drain down and indirect tensile strength characteristics to meet the design standards

Online Surveys in Collecting Cross-Cultural Qualitative User Experience Feedback

Globalisation of markets means that many interactive technology products and services need to be usable and provide a positive User Experience (UX) to people in various target market areas. Simultaneously, over the last decade, positive UX has become an important quality attribute and a business-critical asset in the design of interactive technology products and services. Different countries have different cultural values, which direct the way in which people interpret and use technology products and services. Therefore, to ensure that products and services are easy to use and that they provide a positive UX across cultural boundaries, there is a need to understand how local cultures may affect the use of and interaction with technology. Cultural issues affect not only the UX of technology products and services but also the UX research methods. Culture itself is a complex concept affecting a vast area of human life and interaction. Consequently, designers are facing challenges in creating a delightful UX for an increasing number of users from different cultural backgrounds.In this thesis work, we aim to produce original contributions by investigating and developing better online survey tools and insights about their applicability in cross-cultural remote online UX research. Remote online methods are needed in increasing cross-cultural UX research, and they are considered practical, and may have extensive and wide scale samples suited to cross-cultural UX research. In particular, we aim to understand how an online survey fits into a cross-cultural UX research in terms of collecting qualitative feedback. As the goal is to understand online UX surveys and users in different local cultures it is our aim to gain knowledge about what kind of cultural issues affect these surveys and how they should be taken into consideration in human-centred design (HCD). We focus on studying how qualitative material such as textual and visual materials can be used in cross-cultural online UX surveys. We reflect on the practical implications of the results in a theoretical concept of cross-cultural online UX survey process. Our research has a multiple-case research design strategy and most of our case studies were executed in a real product development context with an emphasis on the qualitative research.We found that online surveys with sentence completion, diaries and storyboards are well suited to crosscultural UX research in collecting qualitative feedback. The central cross-cultural issues having implications for cross-cultural, qualitative online UX surveys concerned textual and visual materials. With regards to the textual material in collecting cross-cultural, qualitative UX feedback, we found that there are cultural differences in how respondents understand, interpret and share their experiences in an online UX survey. For example, culture has an effect on language and communication style, which in turn have an effect on the answers. Furthermore, we found that the use of the sentence completion method in an online UX survey is relatively fast and easy way to collect a large amount of cross-cultural, qualitative UX feedback regarding the different UX dimensions for product development purposes. The use of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions in the data analysis gives a better understanding of the impact of specific cultures on the results.Concerning the visual material, we found that storyboards assisted respondents in providing rich answers to a long survey because of a sound understanding of the intended situations, and ease of imagining themselves in different usage scenarios. The use of internationalised and localised storyboards allowed us to collect UX feedback, even though respondents had never used or seen the intended product. They were able to give feedback and ideas for design in the early phase of product development in requirement gathering. Using culture as a resource for design involving local users in the design process supports HCD principles. We presented the main phases in a theoretical concept of cross-cultural online UX survey process to help designers include cultural issues in the design of a cross-cultural online UX survey

Theory, practice and policy: An inquiry into the uptake of HCI practices in the software industry of a developing country

With almost four decades of existence as a community, human–computer interaction (HCI) practice has yet to diffuse into a large range of software industries globally. A review of existing literature suggests that the diffusion of HCI practices in software organizations lacks theoretical guidance. Although many studies have tried to facilitate HCI uptake by the software industry, there are scarce studies that consider HCI practices as innovations that software organizations could or should adopt. Furthermore, there appears to be a lack of structure in the facilitation of HCI methodological development within the specialized emerging regions field such as Sub-Saharan Africa. In order to address this gap, an exploratory investigation regarding the state of uptake of HCI practices in Nigeria is conducted. The aim of this article is to improve our understanding regarding the state of HCI uptake in developing countries and the challenges prevailing. The findings show that HCI practice still remains within its infancy stage in most software companies. Universities are also lacking the required knowledge transfer of HCI to the students, and in effect themselves contributing to the lack of HCI skills in industry. Furthermore, government policies are in need of refinement and end-users’ involvement in software development is not prioritized

Institutionalizing HCI in Asia

In this paper we investigate the problems and potential solutions to the effective establishment of HCI and usability in India and China. Our discussion is motivated by five years of collaboration with relevant bodies in both countries through EU-funded projects encouraging the development of a usability culture in academic and industrial sectors. In order to contribute to socially-responsible interaction in these countries the ’institutionalization’ of HCI is necessary. For us, this involves three elements: firstly an appropriation of HCI concepts and methods to suit the local country / culture, secondly the forming of a national organization around the reshaped discipline that can actively promote HCI in industry and academia and establish links with local national organizations, and thirdly the roll-out of effective usability practice in industry. Some efforts made in this regard are briefly outlined