USABILITY AS A GOAL FOR THE DESIGN OF COMPUTER SYSTEMS

The goal of all software engineering is to construct computer systems that people find usable and will use. Usability is an overall goal that encompasses both system functionality and user interface issues. Assessing usability is vital for those acquiring software packages as well as for those designing and developing software. The concept is also worth scientific research. Still, defining or measuring usability is problematic both in the course of system development projects and in research settings. The measures promoted by some recent usability studies are inadequate and even give rise to false assumptions. The concept of usability is a difficult one since the factors affecting it are defined only in the use context. It is not possible to evaluate the usability of a computer system without tying it up with the actual activities the user wants to use the system for. This claim is supported by a series of case studies in decision support systems. These studies have clearly shown that no list of usability evaluation criteria suffices in the long run; instead, perceived usability depends heavily on (organizational) context. Still, it is an important goal in every context, not only in decision support systems

A Survey on Web 2.0

Today’s Internet is a far cry from the network of academic sharing as which it began. From the ruins of the dot-com bubble has risen a brave new Internet that O’Reilly has named Web 2.0 while others prefer such names as social net. We were interested in what characterizes today’s Internet services and set out to study eleven Web 2.0 sites that encapsulated the new breed of Internet services. We found that O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 describes well what is happening on the Internet today. Today’s Internet is indeed about harnessing collective intelligence and about user-contributed content. Huge numbers of items require us to use social navigation with its recommender systems to find items of interest and users have advanced from being simple consumers of content to being a major source of the Web 2.0 content as well. Users contribute content directly by uploading text (in blogs, forums, and reviews), photos, and video clips, and in addition to such intentionally contributed content, the systems generate content by tracking user activities. Moreover, today’s Internet services are characterized by sociability. While some services merely provide means for communal discourse, many others, such as MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook, are based on building and maintaining social networks. Regrettably, the social aspects and user-contributed content of the services have also lead to multi-faceted privacy concerns and even such criminal activities as identity theft and child molestation. Furthermore, copyright violations have become an everyday phenomenon. This survey offers examples of modern, state-of-the-art interface features in today’s net and descriptions of the services from the user’s viewpoint. The main goal of the presentation is to outline the current state of Internet services together with recent research findings about them. However, we have not shied away from using many blog posts and other writings on the Internet as source material because it is on the Internet where the web of the future is currently being woven

Gaze Path Stimulation in Retrospective Think-Aloud

For a long time, eye tracking has been thought of as a promising method for usability testing. During the last couple of years, eye tracking has finally started to live up to these expectations, at least in terms of its use in usability laboratories. We know that the user’s gaze path can reveal usability issues that would otherwise go unnoticed, but a common understanding of how best to make use of eye movement data has not been reached. Many usability practitioners seem to have intuitively started to use gaze path replays to stimulate recall for retrospective walk through of the usability test. We review the research on thinkaloud protocols in usability testing and the use of eye tracking in the context of usability evaluation. We also report our own experiment in which we compared the standard, concurrent think-aloud method with the gaze path stimulated retrospective think-aloud method. Our results suggest that the gaze path stimulated retrospective think-aloud method produces more verbal data, and that the data are more informative and of better quality as the drawbacks of concurrent think-aloud have been avoided

Bachelor\u27s Thesis Seminar In Computer Sciences And Information Technology

A Bachelor’s thesis is typically an individually written literature review on a scientifically relevant topic. Additionally, some theses also describe empirical work or report an experiment. Firstly, we introduce how Bachelor’s theses are supervised in a joint thesis seminar for Computer Sciences and Information Technology at our university. The thesis seminar is organized three times a year. It consists of six small group meetings led by a supervisor and contains compulsory pre- and post-assignments and active peer discussions. In 2022, there were in total of 187 students participating in the spring, summer and autumn seminars. Secondly, we give an overview of the 98 completed theses. We classify the theses using ACM’s Computing Classification System and analyze keywords, the number of references and some other bibliometrics to learn about the students and the potential effects of their different study orientations. We also analyze 14 theses that reported practical work, like the implementation of an algorithm or using existing software tools. The main result of our work is to give a research-based view on the supervision of Bachelor’s theses, the organisation of the thesis seminar, and the bibliometrics of the completed thesis

USABILITY AS A GOAL FOR THE DESIGN OF COMPUTER SYSTEMS

The goal of all software engineering is to construct computer systems that people find usable and will use. Usability is an overall goal that encompasses both system functionality and user interface issues. Assessing usability is vital for those acquiring software packages as well as for those designing and developing software. The concept is also worth scientific research. Still, defining or measuring usability is problematic both in the course of sys-tem development projects and in research settings. The measures promoted by some recent usability studies are inadequate and even give rise to false assumptions. The concept of usability is a difficult one since the factors affecting it are defined only in the use context. It is not possible to evaluate the usability of a computer system without tying it up with the actual activities the user wants to use the system for. This claim is supported by a series of case studies in decision support systems. These studies have clearly shown that no list of usability evaluation criteria suffices in the long run; instead, perceived usability depends heavily on (organizational) context. Still, it is an important goal in every context, not only in decision support systems

A Survey on Web 2.0

Today’s Internet is a far cry from the network of academic sharing as which it began. From the ruins of the dot-com bubble has risen a brave new Internet that O’Reilly has named Web 2.0 while others prefer such names as social net. We were interested in what characterizes today’s Internet services and set out to study eleven Web 2.0 sites that encapsulated the new breed of Internet services. We found that O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 describes well what is happening on the Internet today. Today’s Internet is indeed about harnessing collective intelligence and about user-contributed content. Huge numbers of items require us to use social navigation with its recommender systems to find items of interest and users have advanced from being simple consumers of content to being a major source of the Web 2.0 content as well. Users contribute content directly by uploading text (in blogs, forums, and reviews), photos, and video clips, and in addition to such intentionally contributed content, the systems generate content by tracking user activities. Moreover, today’s Internet services are characterized by sociability. While some services merely provide means for communal discourse, many others, such as MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook, are based on building and maintaining social networks. Regrettably, the social aspects and user-contributed content of the services have also lead to multi-faceted privacy concerns and even such criminal activities as identity theft and child molestation. Furthermore, copyright violations have become an everyday phenomenon. This survey offers examples of modern, state-of-the-art interface features in today’s net and descriptions of the services from the user’s viewpoint. The main goal of the presentation is to outline the current state of Internet services together with recent research findings about them. However, we have not shied away from using many blog posts and other writings on the Internet as source material because it is on the Internet where the web of the future is currently being woven

Mobile Phone User Interfaces in Multiplayer Games

This study focuses on the user interface elements of mobile phones and their qualities in multiplayer games. Mobile phone is not intended as a gaming device. Therefore its technology has many shortcomings when it comes to playing mobile games on the device. One of those is the non-standardized user interface design. However, it has also some strengths, such as the portability and networked nature. In addition, many mobile phone models today have a camera, a feature only few gaming devices have. The design of the keypad and joystick has an effect, especially, on multiplayer games, because the players playing against each other rarely have the same phone models. The user interface elements ’ effect on playing mobile multiplayer games was studied with a within subjects test, where participants played five different types of multiplayer games with three mobile camera phones. The game results were analysed based on log data. Also, the participants gave their own evaluations based on their experiences. The results show that a game that is based on steering and selection benefits from a phone model that has a joystick. A small keypad seems to fit typing games very well. Games using typing as their method of interaction are affected the most of all games by the player’s experience with typing text messages. Picture taking as a game interaction method suits all phone models from the user interface point of view. These interaction methods are also very well suited for the growing number of casual players. However, the user interface elements are not the only factors affecting performance. The speed of the phone’s hardware and software affect gaming performance in addition to the player’s experience in mobile phones and gaming on other devices

Observations on Peer Evaluation using Clickers

Clickers and paper forms were used in a senior level HCI class for peer evaluation of student project presentations. Scores given by teachers and students were compared and subjective opinions of students analyzed. Students gave higher scores than teachers and scarcely used the higher and lower ends of the scale. The medium used for evaluation did not have a significant effect on the scores. Students preferred the clickers to paper because of their novelty, possibility of immediate feedback, and easier preservation of privacy. Concerns were raised over lack of individual feedback in the clicker device and limited added value over traditional pen and paper