Metric analysis of the information visibility and diffusion about the European Higher Education Area on Spanish university websites.

The purpose of the study proposed in this paper is to evaluate the Spanish public university websites dedicated to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). To do so, the quality of these resources has been analysed in the light of data provided by a series of indicators grouped in seven criteria, most of which were used to determine what information is made available and in what way. The criteria used in our analysis are: visibility, authority, updatedness, accesibility, correctness and completeness, quality assessment and navigability. All in all, the results allow us to carry out an overall diagnosis of the situation and also provide us with information about the situation at each university, thus revealing their main strengths, namely authority and navegability, and also their chief shortcomings: updatedness, accessibility and quality assessment. In this way it is possible to detect the best practices in each of the aspects evaluated so that they can serve as an example and guide for universities with greater deficiencies and thus help them to improve their EHEA websites

Remote Web usability testing

Recently,various techniques for and approaches to extending usability testing beyond the traditional laboratories and technologies have emerged. Remote usability testing allows researchers to evaluate the usability of websites by gathering information from remote users. Several different approaches have been proposed, but they often require that the user perform particular installations or configurations. We introduce OpenWebSurvey, a software system for remote usability testing that can remotely record users' behavior while they surf the Internet and that requires no program installation or configuration

The whats and hows of programmers' foraging diets

One of the least studied areas of Information Foraging Theory is diet: the information foragers choose to seek. For example, do foragers choose solely based on cost, or do they stubbornly pursue certain diets regardless of cost? Do their debugging strategies vary with their diets? To investigate what and how questions like these for the domain of software debugging, we qualitatively analyzed 9 professional developers\u27 foraging goals, goal patterns, and strategies. Participants spent 50% of their time foraging. Of their foraging, 58% fell into distinct dietary patterns - mostly in patterns not previously discussed in the literature. In general, programmers\u27 foraging strategies leaned more heavily toward enrichment than we expected, but different strategies aligned with different goal types. These and our other findings help fill the gap as to what programmers\u27 dietary goals are and how their strategies relate to those goals. Copyright © 2013 ACM

A Prototype Design for a Virtual Hospice and Initial Usability Study

Hospice provides physical, social, emotional and spiritual care for people with life-shortening illness. Providing equitable access to services is becoming increasingly difficult for all hospices due to a rising number of people living longer with life-shortening illness and limited healthcare resources. Consequently, hospices are increasingly looking at ways of using technology to deliver services over a distance. This paper presents a prototype design for a web-based system (‘virtual hospice’) to improve access to services provided by Highland Hospice in the UK, and an initial usability study involving three elderly male patients. Participants completed most of the usability tasks, made positive comments, and would definitely or likely recommend the system to people who might benefit from it. The findings were translated into recommended changes to the virtual hospice, and may be helpful for other HCI designers and researchers working in this area