Usability Inspection Report of NCSTRL

An evaluation report of the www.ncstrl.org site outlining usability problems and solutions to these problems

An Interactive Environment for Dialogue Development: Its Design, Use and Evaluation

The Author's Interactive Didogue Environment (AIDE) of the Dialogue Management System is an integrated set of direct manipulation tools used by a dialogue author to design and implement human-computer interfaces without writing source code. This paper presents the conceptua! dialogue transaction model upon which AIDE is based, describes AIDE, and illustrates how a dialope author develops an interface using AIDE. A preliminary empirical evaluation of the use of AIDE versus the use of a programming language to implement an interface shows very encouraging results

Building Bridges and Interfaces: Toward the Next Generation of UIMS

User interface management systems (UIMS) have established themselves in both research and commercial arenas. We present several generations in UIMS evolution and discuss some problems of the early generations. In particular, we discuss the problems of a gap between methods used by behavioral scientists and computer scientists during the process of building interfaces. We present an empirical approach to begin bridging this gap and results of our preliminary observations: a human-computer interface development life cycle and recording techniques for interface development, as well as UIMS needed to support them. We conclude with future directions for the evolution of UIMS

UIMS: Toward the Next Generation

First generation User Interface Management Systems (UIMS) have established themselves in both research and commercial areas. This paper discusses improved usability and extension of UIMS to include a broader whole system development life cycle as the basis for evolution of a second generation of UIMS. Problems of first generation UIMS, some informal empirical work that is leading toward an interface development life cycle and UIMS to directions for the anticipated evolution are presented

Trusting Remote Users… Can They Identify Problems Without Involving Usability Experts?

Based on our belief that critical incident data, observed during usage and associated closely with specific task performance are the most useful kind of formative evaluation data for finding and fixing usability problems, we developed a Remote Usability Evaluation Method (RUEM) that involves real users self-reporting critical incidents encountered in real tasks performed in their normal working environments without the intervention of evaluators. In our exploratory study we observed that users were able to identify, report, and rate the severity level of their own critical incidents with only brief training

Remote Usability Testing Methods a la Carte

Although existing lab-based formative usability testing is frequently and effectively applied to improving usability of software user interfaces, it has limitations that have led developers to turn to remote usability evaluation methods (RUEMs) to collect formative usability data from daily usage by real users in their own real-world task environments. The enormous increase in Web usage, where users can be isolated and the network and remote work settingbecome intrinsic parts of usage patterns, is strong motivation for supplementing lab-based testing with remote usability evaluation methods. Another significant impetus for remote evaluation is the fact that the iterative development cycle for any software, Web application or not, does not end with initial deployment. We review and informally compare several approaches to remote usability evaluation with respect to quantity and quality of data collected and the effort to collect the data

Implementation of Predicate-Based Protection in MULTISAFE

This paper reports some implementation work done within the MULTI SAFE database protection research project group at Virginia Tech. It describes the evolution of an approach to database security from a formal model of predicate-based protection, through an implementation model, to an on-going implementation. The implementation model is based on a relational database approach to the management of protection information (stored representations of authorizations). Classes of access decision dependency are reviewed. Protection policies, design deci¬sions, and special implementation problems are discussed. Detailed examples are used to illustrate the use of this flexible and generalized approach to database security within the MULTI SAFE system architecture

Usability Inspection Report of iLumina

iLumina is a digital library of sharable undergraduate teaching resource materials for science, mathematics, technology, and engineering being developed by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (UNCW), Collegis, Virginia Tech, Georgia State University, Grand Valley State and The College of New Jersey. Types of iLumina resources include papers, tutorials, applets, presentations, visualizations, experiments, assignments, software, exercises

Synthesis-Oriented Situational Analysis in User Interface Design

Analytic evaluation is a term describing a class of techniques for examining a representation of a user interface design, discovering design flaws and/or predicting user task performance. In our work with analytic evaluation, we have observed limitations on the effectiveness and efficiency of analytic techniques for formative evaluation supporting the iterative design and re-design cycle. Here we support those observations with arguments based on theoretical limitations of the models underlying these techniques. By way of comparison we discuss desirable characteristics for an alternative approach. In our search for such an alternative, we have developed the Task Mapping Model, a substantively different approach to analysis for supporting the user interface design. We briefly describe the Task Mapping Model and give some examples illustrating its desirable characteristics

Efficient Computation of Voronoi Diagrams

It is generally agreed that some kind of separation is needed between the human-computer dialogue and the computational component of an interactive software system. This paper addresses two major issues