A comparison of what is part of usability testing in three countries

The cultural diversity of users of technology challenges our methods for usability evaluation. In this paper we report and compare three ethnographic interview studies of what is a part of a standard (typical) usability test in a company in Mumbai, Beijing and Copenhagen. At each of these three locations, we use structural and contrast questions do a taxonomic and paradigm analysis of a how a company performs a usability test. We find similar parts across the three locations. We also find different results for each location. In Mumbai, most parts of the usability test are not related to the interactive application that is tested, but to differences in user characteristics, test preparation, method, and location. In Copenhagen, considerations about the client´s needs are part of a usability test. In Beijing, the only varying factor is the communication pattern and relation to the user. These results are then contrasted in a cross cultural matrix to identify cultural themes that can help interpret results from existing laboratory research in usability test methods

Web Portal Development Issues: Usability, Site Managementand Content Management

This paper is written with the aim to present the concept of integration between usability, content management and site management in order to design an effective tourism website. The study is based on the common problems that surrounds most of the web developers such as useless contents plus poor design that did not reflect the audience needs and poor site management such as broken links and unsorted web pages that are hard to be keep track. The study will cover on the application of the usability techniques to describe what is right and what is wrong with websites seen by millions. It will also covers on how the site management and content management play important roles in achieving high usability of the website. Assessing usability through case studies and following some guidelines on achieving effective site management and good content management will be part of the methods use in this project. The findings from this study highlight the importance of these existing guidelines and the need to modify or implement some of them to suit the requirement of a good tourism website through a prototype developed in this project

Towards a framework for predicting whole life-cycle cost for long-term digital preservation

Estimating the costs for the whole lifecycle of long-term digital preservation (LTDP) activities ena-bles decision makers to choose carefully what data to preserve, duration of preservation and type of preservation techniques best applied for their information. To address this need, a framework is de-veloped to generate a cost model that will estimate costs for long-term digital preservation activities using storage in the cloud and taking into consideration the impact of mitigating uncertainties, espe-cially obsolescence issues on future costs. This cost estimating framework is part of the European pro-ject entitled ‘Enabling kNowledge Sustainability Usability and Recovery for Economic value’ which aims to provide a total long-term digital preservation solution for companies and public sector organi-sations interested in keeping their digital information alive for the long-term within the healthcare, fi-nancial and the clinical trials business sectors

You Belong Here: An \u27Interpellative\u27 Approach to Usability

Given the participatory, immersive Web 2.0 culture that characterizes digital experiences today, what is traditionally understood as \u27usability\u27 is insufficient to drive the engagement Web 2.0 audiences both crave and have come to expect from best-in-class interfaces. Thus, this dissertation presents a \u27constructivist\u27 vision of usability that helps designers \u27speak\u27 to audiences who demand excellence, and who will leave when confronted with mediocrity. The constructivist practice of usability occurs through what I call \u27interpellative design.\u27 Interpellative design is both a complement to, and a critique of, \u27accommodationist\u27 approaches to usability (Howard, 2010a) which tend to be associated with technical problem solving (Jordan, 2001), ease of use (Shedroff, 2001), and \u27expedient\u27 solutions (Katz, 1992) to mechanistic problems. As part of the under-theorized \u27constructivist\u27 approach to usability (Howard, 2010a), interpellative design allows usability to remain a \u27problem-solving discipline\u27 (Jordan, 2001); however, its focus on beauty, argument, and the figural dialogue between designers and users extends the purview of usability into non-algorithmic pursuits. To describe a constructivist approach to usability, I outline a theoretical taxonomy which identifies factors at play in interpellative user interfaces. An \u27interpellative interface\u27 is one which calls out or \u27hails\u27 (Althusser, 1971a) users and indicates that a given interface is a viable \u27place\u27 in which they can exert influence, accomplish tasks, or solve problems. The hail is facilitated through the construction of a habitus and use of social capital (Bourdieu, 1984). Briefly, a habitus is the space into which users are interpellated, and acts and artifacts of social capital are expressions of how they belong in that space. In examining how these factors manifest in digital interfaces, I argue that the constructivist approach to usability enacted through interpellative design enables usability engineers to identify flaws in interfaces that were not apparent before the mechanisms of habitus and social capital were explicated. The lens of interpellative design allows usability engineers to address the constructivist concerns pertaining to emotion, visual communication, and other types of \u27distinctions\u27 (Bourdieu, 1984) that could not be \u27seen\u27 before

Evaluating the usability and usefulness of a digital library

Purpose - System usability and system usefulness are interdependent properties of system interaction, which in combination, determine system satisfaction and usage. Often approached separately, or in the case of digital libraries, often focused upon usability, there is emerging consensus among the research community for their unified treatment and research attention. However, a key challenge is to identify, both respectively and relatively, what to measure and how, compounded by concerns regarding common understanding of usability measures, and associated calls for more valid and complete measures within integrated and comprehensive models. The purpose of this paper is to address this challenge. Design/methodology/approach - Identified key usability and usefulness attributes and associated measures, compiled an integrated measurement framework, identified a suitable methodological approach for application of the framework, and conducted a pilot study on an interactive search system developed by a Health Service as part of their e-library service. Findings - Effectiveness, efficiency, aesthetic appearance, terminology, navigation, and learnability are key attributes of system usability; and relevance, reliability, and currency key attributes of system usefulness. There are shared aspects to several of these attributes, but each is also sufficiently unique to preserve its respective validity. They can be combined as part of a multi-method approach to system evaluation. Research limitations/implications - Pilot study has demonstrated that usability and usefulness can be readily combined, and that questionnaire and observation are valid multi-method approaches, but further research is called for under a variety of conditions, with further combinations of methods, and larger samples. Originality/value - This paper provides an integrated measurement framework, derived from the goal, question, metric paradigm, which provides a relatively comprehensive and representative set of system usability and system usefulness attributes and associated measures, which could be adapted and further refined on a case-by-case basis

Bridging the gap between human and machine trust : applying methods of user-centred design and usability to computer security

This work presents methods for improving the usability of security. The work focuses on trust as part of computer security. Methods of usability and user-centred design present an essential starting point for the research. The work uses the methods these fields provide to investigate differences between machine and human trust, as well as how the technical expressions of trust could be made more usable by applying these methods. The thesis is based on nine publications, which present various possibilities to research trust with user-centric methods. The publications proceed chronologically and logically from the first user interviews about trust, trusting attitudes and behaviours in general to the actual design and usability testing of user interfaces for security applications, finally presenting the outcomes and conclusions of the research. The work also presents a review of relevant previous work in the area, concentrating on work done in the fields of usability and user-centred design. The work is of cross-disciplinary nature, falling into the areas of human-computer interaction, computer science and telecommunications. The ultimate goal of the conducted research has been to find out 1) how trust is to be understood in this context; 2) what methods can be used to gain insight into trust thus defined; and, finally, 3) what means can be used to create trust in the end users in online situations, where trust is needed. The work aims at providing insight into how trust can be studied with the methods provided by user-centred design and usability. Further, it investigates how to take understanding of trust formation in humans into account when attempting to design trust-inducing systems and applications. The work includes an analysis and comparison of the methods used: what kinds of methods to study trust exist in the field of usability and user-centred design. Further, it is evaluated, what kind of results and when can be reached with the different methods available, by applying a variety of these methods. Recommendations for the appropriate application of these methods when studying the various parts of trust is one of the outcomes. The results received with the methods used have also been compared with results received by others by applying alternative methods to the same research questions. On a conceptual level, the work contains an analysis of the concept of trust. It also contains a brief investigation into both technical and humane ways to express trust, with a comparison between the two

Technology Culture of Mobile Maintenance Men

Technology plays a major role in our life and the role is increasing as a result of fast technological development occurring all the time. Technology’s impact on our everyday life sets new challenges also to designers. In order to design products which are usable. We need to understand technologies and devices we are developing, users of our designed products, and the relationships our users have with different kinds of technologies. User-centred design (UCD) has emerged as a counter part for traditional technology centred product development. UCD emphasizes the role of the users in every phase of product design and development. However, it seems that the users’ relationships with technologies is underestimated and sometimes even forgotten also in UCD. The users’ current tools and technological environment is seen as just surroundings and task related tools instead of as an important factor that affects to users’ actions and opinions. This article presents a case study where mobile IT maintenance men where studied with traditional UCD methods and in addition the user research was deepened with focusing on users’ relationships with technology. The results show that UCD’s methods can miss some critical phenomena relating to users’ relationships with technology and affecting to usability and quality of the developed products. Understanding how users comprehend the technologies they use, i.e. understanding what kind of technology culture the users are a part of, enables designers to better evaluate how well the developed product will fit in the lives of it’s users and what sorts of changes are possibly going to happen or required to happen in order the new product to be included in the users’ technology culture. These kinds of evaluations help the designers to design better products and the companies to better estimate business risks relating to for example technology acceptance. Keywords: Technology Culture, User-Centred Design, User Research, Distributed and Mobile Work</p

Revealing unawareness in usability related decision-making

Nowadays, many users experience usability issues with their electronic products. It does not work as they expect or otherwise irritates the user, so he becomes dissatisfied about the product and may even complain about it. Th ese numbers of complaints to companies and usability issues are high and rising. Reasons for these increasing numbers are the highly complex electronic products that are being developed, the global economy in which they are created and produced, and the wide variety of users that uses the product. It is highly challenging to develop these increasingly complex products and interactions and for the wide variety of users. So design for usability is becoming ever more important. Many usability techniques are available to create these products, however the pressure from the market results in limited time to develop usable products. Th is makes that feedback from the market is not available on time, that usability tests are skipped, and hasty decisions are made. This all, may lead to ‘incorrect’ decisions and consequently to usability issues. These are some of the aspects that complicate creating products and make that usability issues still occur, despite the available usability techniques. In design practice decision-making was investigated to find out what makes usability related decisionmaking ‘go wrong’. This was in order to improve decisionmaking and thereby reduce the number of usability issues. The research started with a literature study to clarify terms such as design and decision-making. Designing products is an iterative process to create products of which problem solving and finding creative solutions are part of. Within this process the designer encounters different kinds of problems; structured problems and ill-structured problems. Each of these problems requires different approaches; Rational Problem Solving for structured problems and Reflective Practice for ill-structured problems. Both approaches are used in the process of creating products. In design theory only limited literature on decision-making is available, therefore it was required to study decision-making in fields beyond design. Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) literature appeared to be an interesting perspective on decision-making, possibly relevant to design. NDM researchers observed decision-making in the ‘real world’, outside the laboratories. They realised that Rational Problem Solving is not always possible in the ‘real world’ as decisionmakers have also to cope with ill-structured problems and other influencing factors and elements. NDM researchers identified two factors that influence decisionmaking; the ‘real world context’ and ‘uncertainty’. These factors infl uence the decision task, making it more difficult to make decisions, and aff ecting the quality of decisions possibly resulting in ‘incorrect’ decisions. The factor ‘real world context’ is characterised by various elements, for example, time pressure, iterative design and multiple stakeholders. The influencing factor ‘uncertainty’ is defined by the types what the decision-maker can be uncertain of and by the sources that induce uncertainty. Comparing these infl uencing factors from NDM theory with design theory showed a similarity between the elements that characterise the context and the aspects of uncertainty. This suggested that these infl uencing factors could also be relevant to decision-making in design. Therefore the NDM perspective was used to investigate usability related decision-making in design practice. Knowing what infl uences decision-making indicates how decision-making could be improved in order to reduce the number of usability issues. A first explorative study (Study 1) at a Dutch design agency was conducted to identify possible infl uencing factors on usability related decision-making. Th e results of eight retrospective interviews revealed three influencing factors on usability related decision-making: ¿ design context ¿ uncertainty ¿ unawareness The third influencing factor, which was not mentioned in literature, might be a critical factor as it could lead to unexpected surprises such as usability issues. Further investigation of this factor was required to verify whether unawareness actually is an influencing factor on usability related decision-making in design practice and whether it is critical or not. A second study (Study 2) was conducted at a multinational product development company. At that time unawareness was still an undefined term. In order to identify unawareness the consequences of this influencing factor were investigated; unforeseen usability issues. This was done by conducting retrospective interviews with 14 key team members, which revealed various unforeseen usability issues. Tracing them back, it could be concluded that unawareness plays a role during decision-making in design practice and that it is a critical influencing factor as various unforeseen usability issues resulted from it. These critical and unknown influencing factor required further investigation. The third study (Study 3) was a retrospective study at a multinational development company to obtain a better understanding of the influencing factor ‘unawareness’. The results were based on a document analysis of 2.056 project documents. Th is study provided detailed examples of unawareness during decision-making that resulted in unforeseen usability issues. A description of unawareness was made based on these various examples of unawareness in design practice. Unawareness is described – similar to uncertainty – by its types and sources. Three types of unawareness were identified to describe what the decision-maker can be unaware of: ¿ unawareness about information ¿ unawareness about the consequences ¿ unawareness about decisions Three sources were identifi ed that contribute to unawareness: ¿ inadequate consideration ¿ inadequate overview ¿ fixation In design practice, it is this influencing factor ‘unawareness’ that contributes to usability related decision-making going ‘wrong’. Th is in spite of the many available usability techniques, these techniques do not address the sources of unawareness. Unawareness during the decision-making process results in decisions of poor quality, leading to ‘incorrect’ decisions and usability issues. Therefore unawareness in the design process needs to be reduced to improve the quality of usability related decisions. To do so, it is necessary to acknowledge this influencing factor, recognise the sources of the factor and address the sources that induce the unawareness

Customer perception of switch-feel in luxury sports utility vehicles

Successful new product introduction requires that product characteristics relate to the customer on functional, emotional, aesthetic and cultural levels. As a part of research into automotive human machine interfaces (HMI), this paper describes holistic customer research carried out to investigate how the haptics of switches in luxury sports utility vehicles (SUVs) are perceived by customers. The application of these techniques, including an initial proposal for objective specifications, is addressed within the broader new product introduction context, and benefits described. One-hundred and one customers of SUVs assessed the feel of automotive push switches, completing the tasks both in, and out of vehicles to investigate the effect of context. Using the semantic differential technique, hedonic testing, and content analysis of customers’ verbatim comments, a holistic picture has been built up of what influences the haptic experience. It was found that customers were able to partially discriminate differences in switch-feel, alongside considerations of visual appearance, image, and usability. Three factors named ‘Affective’, ‘Robustness and Precision’, and ‘Silkiness’ explained 61% of the variance in a principle components analysis. Correlations of the factors with acceptance scores were 0.505, 0.371, and 0.168, respectively