HCI knowledge for UX practices in the web development process

Web development must consider good design in order to satisfy user interaction. However, for many users, the interfaces of Web applications are still difficult and frustrating to use. Frustration may not only result in personal dissatisfaction and inefficient use, but may also have a bad effect in the workplace. One experience with misleading data or unexpected results will undermine a person's willingness to use an application for a long time. Knowledge of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) supports developers in designing useful, usable and pleasant computing technologies. However, regardless of this knowledge, practice of the waterfall approach is the main methodology, embedded and integrated in well-established procedures. This study reports the results of a survey of 82 individual practitioners who received a formal HCI and HCI-related education in their Web development projects. The study used a Likert-scale metric to measure the prevailing User Experience (UX) in explicit practice which is rooted in the HCI-related discipline. The findings indicate that enforcement of the use of HCI knowledge can strengthen the policy of integrating UX principles in the Web development process by the appropriate authority, e.g. university department for project assignment

Social Overlays: Collectively Making Websites More Usable

Abstract. Many small organizations lack the expertise and resources to conduct usability evaluations of their websites. Social Overlays, presented here, is a new system that allows a community of users to collectively improve their website. Social Overlays enables end–users to identify and repair common user interface problems through creating “overlays ” on web pages as part of their regular use, thereby improving usability while reducing the need for professional services. In short, Social Overlays harnesses the diversity of experience and ideas within a community to "crowd source " usability. To evaluate Social Overlays, we examined whether a group of community members without any usability training could use Social Overlays to identify and repair UI problems on their medium–sized community’s website. We found that they could. Community users were able to uncover a large number of UI problems and formulate reasonable solutions to the problems they identified. In addition, we compared Social Overlays to two standard ways of assessing website usability: expert inspection and usability testing. We found that Social Overlays users identified more problems, and their reported problems differed in useful ways from those found by the experts and the usability testing team