Butterfleye : supporting the development of accessible web applications for users with severe motor-impairment

Various accessibility standards and guidelines exist, targeting different disabilities. Nonetheless persons suffering from Severe Motor Disabilities (SMD) are generally excluded from development efforts, mainly because of a lack in accessibility regulations, standards and developer support. This work presents Butterfleye, a novel developer-centric tool that facilitates the development of accessible gaze-driven web applications for SMD users. Butterfleye relies and builds upon a widely-adopted open-source front-end framework to incentivise frictionless developer adoption. Low cost eye-tracking devices are also examined to lower barriers for end-user adoption. We present an open-source library developed iteratively over a series of user-centric studies and report initial evidence of, and observations on, its effectiveness with SMD users.peer-reviewe

Designing acceptable user registration processes for e-services

User registration can have a serious impact on the success of online government services. Different services require different levels of identity assurance, and different registration processes are put in place to deliver them. But from the citizen’s perspective, these processes often require a disproportionate amount of effort, which reduces users’ acceptance. Typically, when sign-up to high-effort services is not mandatory, take-up is low; when it is compulsory, it causes resentment, and neither is desirable. Designers of services requiring registration currently have no way of assessing likely user acceptance at design time. We are introducing a tool that allows system designers to identify the impact of registration processes on different groups of users, in terms of workload and friction. Personas have been successfully applied to assist security designers, and we extend the concept with statistical properties, and introduce the Persona Group Calibration (PGC) exercise to calibrate the different personas for sensitivity to specific identity-related elements.peer-reviewe

Assessing User Interface Aesthetics based on the Inter-subjectivity of Judgment

"How to assess user interface aesthetics?" remains a question faced by many user interface researchers and designers during the user interface development life cycle since aesthetics positively influence usability, user experience, pleasureability, and trust. Visual techniques borrowed from visual design suggest that the graphical user interface layout could be assessed by aesthetic metrics such as balance, symmetry, proportion, regularity, and simplicity, to name a few. Whereas different formulas exist for computing each aesthetic metric and different interpretations to sum up their results, no consensus exists today on how to consistently evaluate these metrics in a way that is aligned with human judgement, which is intrinsically subjective. In order to address the challenging alignment of human subjectivity with machine objectivity, this paper reports on an experiment comparing the results issued from the inter-subjectivity of judgment of fifteen participants evaluating four main aesthetic metrics on a sample of ten graphical user interfaces and the values of these metrics calculated semi-automatically by a web-based application. The experiment suggests that some metrics, e.g. symmetry, proportion, simplicity, as computed from the formula are actually positively correlated with human judgment, while some other metrics, such as balance, are surprisingly not correlated with the formula computed, thus indicating that another formula or another interpretation should be determined. Therefore, a new formula for computing balance is defined that decomposes balance into horizontal and vertical balances which re-establish a correlation. This paper then provides some new insights on how to rely on these aesthetic metrics and other related metrics, whether they are interpreted manually or computed automatically

Exploiting Space and Location as a Design Framework for Interactive Mobile Systems

This article considers the importance of context in mobile systems. It considers a range of context-related issues and focus on location as a key issue for mobile systems. A design framework is described consisting of taxonomies of location, mobility, population, and device awareness. The design framework informs the construction of a semantic model of space for mobile systems. The semantic model is reflected in a computational model built on a distributed platform that allows contextual information to be shared across a number of mobile devices. The framework supports the design of interactive mobile systems while the platform supports their rapid development