Introduction to the special section:Designing a better user experience for self-service systems

June 2013 issue of IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication features a special section on 'Designing a Better User Experience for Self-Service Systems'. Self-service systems offers the users the benefit of 24/7 access to an ever-growing range of services and perhaps also a strong sense of autonomy and fulfillment. Three papers in this section approach the design of the user experience of self-service systems in an integrated way and show the readership of this journal what methods and techniques can be used in this type of design process. These are, 'Identifying User Experience Factors for Mobile Incident Reporting in Urban Contexts,' by Bach, Bernhaupt, and Winckler, 'Improving User Experience for Passenger Information Systems. Prototypes and Reference Objects,' by Wirtz and Jakobs, and in 'A User-Centered Design Approach to Self-Service Ticket Vending Machines,' by Siebenhandl, Schreder, Smuc, Mayr, and Nagl

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines [2006 edition]

The new edition of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines. These guidelines reflect HHS’ commitment to identifying innovative, research-based approaches that result in highly responsive and easy-to-use Web sites for the public. These guidelines help move us in that direction by providing practical, yet authoritative, guidance on a broad range of Web design and communication issues. Having access to the best available research helps to ensure we make the right decisions the first time around and reduces the possibility of errors and costly mistakes

Race, Slavery, and the Expression of Sexual Violence in Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon

Historically, victims of sexual violence have rarely left written accounts of their abuse, so while sexual violence has long been associated with slavery in the United States, historians have few accounts from formerly enslaved people who experienced it first-hand. Through a close reading of the narrative of Louisa Picquet, a survivor of sexual violence in Georgia and Louisiana, this article reflects on the recovery of evidence of sexual violence under slavery through amanuensis-recorded testimony, the unintended evidence of survival within the violent archive of female slavery, and the expression of “race” as an authorial device through which to demonstrate the multigenerational nature of sexual victimhood

Appalachian Spring

A large mural that was created by 19 studio art and education students in 2009. Renowned Latina artist Judith Baca worked alongside the students.https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/university_art_collection/1090/thumbnail.jp

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Gender Roles and Medical Progress

Maternal mortality was the second-leading cause of death for women in childbearing years up until the mid-1930s in the United States. For each death, twenty times as many mothers were estimated to suffer pregnancy-related conditions, often leading to severe and prolonged disablement. Poor maternal health made it particularly hard for mothers to engage in market work. Between 1930 and 1960, there was a remarkable reduction in maternal mortality and morbidity, thanks to medical advances. We argue that these medical advances, by enabling women to reconcile work and motherhood, were essential for the joint rise in married women's labor force participation and fertility over this period. We also show that the diffusion of infant formula played an important auxiliary role

New perspectives on document evaluation methods

Document evaluation and usability testing are gradually developing into an interesting area of multidisciplinary research. Five recent developments are discussed: the broadening notion of document quality, the increasing variety of evaluation approaches, the need to integrate experiences and research from various communication disciplines, methodological research into evaluation approaches, and the use of evaluation results to formulate design guidelines

The Validity of the Stimulated Retrospective Think-Aloud Method as Measured by Eye Tracking

Retrospective Think aloud (RTA) is a usability method that collects the verbalization of a user’s performance after the performance is over. There has been little work done to investigate the validity and reliability of RTA. This paper reports on an experiment investigating these issues using the method called stimulated RTA. By comparing subjects’ verbalizations with their eye movements, we found stimulated RTA to be valid and reliable: the method provides a valid account of what people attended to in completing tasks, it has a low risk of introducing fabrications, and its validity is unaffected by task complexity. More detailed analysis of RTA shows that it also provides additional information about user’s inferences and strategies in completing tasks. The findings of this study provide valuable support for usability practitioners to use RTA and to trust the users ’ performance information collected by this method in a usability study. Author Keywords Retrospective think aloud, validity, reliability