| Human Factors Engineering as the Methodological Babel Fish: Translating User Needs into Software Design | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 1-17 | |
| Neville A. Stanton | |||
| The aim of this paper is to show, by way of two case studies, the value of
including Human Factors in interaction and interface design specification. It
is argued that Human Factors offers and unique and useful perspective and
contributes positively to design. Human Factors sits between subject matter
experts and software engineers, translating user requirements though the
applications of theory, models and methods. This results in software design
requirements that have been intelligently interpreted and presented in a
graphical manner. The two case studies demonstrate the differences between the
interfaces with and without Human Factors input. Both cases show quantitative
and qualitative benefits of including Human Factors in design. Performance
improvements between 20-70 percent were demonstrated, which is typical of Human
Factors design interventions. Keywords: Human Factors Methods; Requirements Specification; Case Study | |||
| Improving Software Effort Estimation Using an Expert-Centred Approach | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 18-33 | |
| Emilia Mendes | |||
| A cornerstone of software project management is effort estimation, the
process by which effort is forecasted and used as basis to predict costs and
allocate resources effectively, so enabling projects to be delivered on time
and within budget. Effort estimation is a very complex domain where the
relationship between factors is non-deterministic and has an inherently
uncertain nature, and where corresponding decisions and predictions require
reasoning with uncertainty. Most studies in this field, however, have to date
investigated ways to improve software effort estimation by proposing and
comparing techniques to build effort prediction models where such models are
built solely from data on past software projects -- data-driven models. The
drawback with such approach is threefold: first, it ignores the explicit
inclusion of uncertainty, which is inherent to the effort estimation domain,
into such models; second, it ignores the explicit representation of causal
relationships between factors; third, it relies solely on the variables being
part of the dataset used for model building, under the assumption that those
variables represent the fundamental factors within the context of software
effort prediction. Recently, as part of a New Zealand and later on Brazilian
government-funded projects, we investigated the use of an expert-centred
approach in combination with a technique that enables the explicit inclusion of
uncertainty and causal relationships as means to improve software effort
estimation. This paper will first provide an overview of the effort estimation
process, followed by the discussion of how an expert-centred approach to
improving such process can be advantageous to software companies. In addition,
we also detail our experience building and validating six different
expert-based effort estimation models for ICT companies in New Zealand and
Brazil. Post-mortem interviews with the participating companies showed that
they found the entire process extremely beneficial and worthwhile, and that all
the models created remained in use by those companies. Finally, the methodology
focus of this paper, which focuses on expert knowledge elicitation and
participation, can be employed not only to improve a software effort estimation
process, but also to improve other project management-related activities. Keywords: Software Effort Estimation; Expert-centred Approach; Process Improvement;
Cost Estimation; Project Management | |||
| A Compositional Model for Gesture Definition | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 34-52 | |
| Lucio Davide Spano; Antonio Cisternino; Fabio Paternò | |||
| The description of a gesture requires temporal analysis of values generated
by input sensors and does not fit well the observer pattern traditionally used
by frameworks to handle user input. The current solution is to embed particular
gesture-based interactions, such as pinch-to-zoom, into frameworks by notifying
when a whole gesture is detected. This approach suffers from a lack of
flexibility unless the programmer performs explicit temporal analysis of raw
sensors data. This paper proposes a compositional, declarative meta-model for
gestures definition based on Petri Nets. Basic traits are used as building
blocks for defining gestures; each one notifies the change of a feature value.
A complex gesture is defined by the composition of other sub-gestures using a
set of operators. The user interface behaviour can be associated to the
recognition of the whole gesture or to any other sub-component, addressing the
problem of granularity for the notification events. The meta-model can be
instantiated for different gesture recognition supports and its definition has
been validated through a proof of concept library. Sample applications have
been developed for supporting multitouch gestures on iOS and full body gestures
with Microsoft Kinect. Keywords: Input and Interaction Technologies; Model-based design; Software
architecture and engineering; Gestural Interaction | |||
| A Design Process for Exhibiting Design Choices and Trade-Offs in (Potentially) Conflicting User Interface Guidelines | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 53-71 | |
| Llúcia Masip; Célia Martinie; Marco Winckler; Philippe Palanque; Toni Granollers; Marta Oliva | |||
| In the last decades a huge amount of knowledge about user interface design
has been gathered in the form of guidelines. Quite often, guidelines are
compiled according to user interface properties (e.g. usability, accessibility)
and/or application domains (e.g. Web, mobile). In many situations designers
have to combine several guideline sets in order to address the specific
application domain and the desired set of properties corresponding to the
application under consideration. Despite the fact that the problems related to
the selection of guidelines from different sources are not new, the occurrence
and management of conflicting guidelines are poorly documented leaving
designers with little help in order to handle conflicts in a rationale and
consistent way. In this paper we revise the questions related to selection and
management of conflicting guidelines and we propose a systematic approach based
on design rationale tools and techniques for exhibiting choices and trade-offs
when combining different guidelines sets. This paper illustrates how such as an
approach can also be used to deepen the knowledge on the use of user interface
guidelines recording decisions across projects in an iterative way. Keywords: user interface guidelines; guidelines management; design rationale | |||
| A Development Process for Usable Large Scale Interactive Critical Systems: Application to Satellite Ground Segments | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 72-93 | |
| Célia Martinie; Philippe Palanque; David Navarre; Eric Barboni | |||
| While a significant effort is being undertaken by the Human-Computer
Interaction community in order to extend current knowledge about how users
interact with computing devices and how to design and evaluate new interaction
techniques, very little has been done to improve the reliability of software
offering such interaction techniques. However, malfunctions and failures occur
in interactive systems leading to incidents or accidents that, in aviation for
instance, are [22] 80% of the time attributed to human error demonstrating the
inadequacy between the system and its operators. As an error may have a huge
impact on human life, strong requirements are usually set both on the final
system and on the development process itself. Interactive safety-critical
systems have to be designed taking into account on an equal basis several
properties including usability, reliability and operability while their
associated design process is required to handle issues such as scalability,
verification, testing and traceability. However, software development solutions
in the area of critical systems are not adequate leading to defects especially
when the interactive aspects are considered. Additionally, the training program
development is always designed independently from the system development
leading to operators trained with inadequate material. In this paper we propose
a new iterative design process embedding multiple design and modeling
techniques (both formal and informal) advocated by HCI and dependable computing
domains. These techniques have been adapted and tuned for interactive systems
and are used in a synergistic way in order to support the integration of
factors such as usability, dependability and operability and at the same time
in order to deal with scalability, verification and traceability. Keywords: Software engineering; formal methods; task modeling; safety management;
model-based design; training | |||
| Agile User Experience Development in a Large Software Organization: Good Expertise but Limited Impact | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 94-111 | |
| Kati Kuusinen; Tommi Mikkonen; Santtu Pakarinen | |||
| While Agile methods were originally introduced for small, tightly coupled
teams, leaner ways of working are becoming a practical method to run entire
enterprises. As the emphasis of user experience work has inherently been on the
early phases before starting the development, it also needs to be adapted to
the Agile way of working. To improve the current practices in Agile user
experience work, we determined the present state of a multi-continental
software development organization that already had a functioning user
experience team. In this paper, we describe the most prevalent issues regarding
the interaction of user experience design and software development activities,
and suggest improvements to fix those. Most of the observed problems were
related to communication issues and to the service mode of the user experience
team. The user experience team was operating between management and development
organizations trying to adapt to the dissimilar practices of both the
disciplines. Keywords: User experience (UX); Agile development; human-centered design (HCD);
human-computer interaction (HCI) | |||
| Can GUI Implementation Markup Languages Be Used for Modelling? | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 112-129 | |
| Carlos Eduardo Silva; José Creissac Campos | |||
| The current diversity of available devices and form factors increases the
need for model-based techniques to support adapting applications from one
device to another. Most work on user interface modelling is built around
declarative markup languages. Markup languages play a relevant role, not only
in the modelling of user interfaces, but also in their implementation. However,
the languages used by each community (modellers/developers) have, to a great
extent evolved separately. This means that the step from concrete model to
final interface becomes needlessly complicated, requiring either compilers or
interpreters to bridge this gap. In this paper we compare a modelling language
(UsiXML) with several markup implementation languages. We analyse if it is
feasible to use the implementation languages as modelling languages. Keywords: User Interfaces; Modelling; Markup languages | |||
| Constraining and Creating Solutions -- Reflections on the Analysis of Early Design | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 130-145 | |
| Chris Roast | |||
| This research explores how an existing analytic framework (the cognitive
dimensions framework) for interactive digital design reflects knowledge
relevant to exploring the design space. The work examines this idea through the
analysis of the transcripts of three digital design collaborative workshops run
as part of "Studying Professional Software Design". Expert deliberation within
these workshops is assessed and related to the analytic framework. The
cognitive dimension framework has not been applied to observational data of
this sort before. However, the approach described in this paper appears to
provide a viable means of analysis. In conclusion we demonstrate that
approaching observational data in this manner is not highly complex but is
sufficient to provide useful insights. Reflections from the resulting analysis
shed light on the interests and tensions evident in early stages of digital
product design. Keywords: user centred development; early design decisions; cognitive dimensions | |||
| Smartphone Applications Usability Evaluation: A Hybrid Model and Its Implementation | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 146-163 | |
| Artur H. Kronbauer; Celso A. S. Santos; Vaninha Vieira | |||
| Evaluating the usability of smartphone applications is crucial for their
success, so developers can learn how to adapt them considering the dynamicity
of mobile scenarios. The HCI community recommends considering different
requirements when evaluating those applications, such as quantitative data
(metrics), subjective evaluation (users' impressions) and context data (e.g.
environment and devices conditions). We observed a lack in the literature of
approaches that support those three requirements combined into a single
experiment; generally one or a pair of them is used. Besides, performing
usability evaluation on real mobile scenarios is hard to achieve and most
proposals are based on laboratory-controlled experiments. In this paper, we
present our proposal for a hybrid usability evaluation of smartphone
applications, which is composed by a model and an infrastructure that
implements it. The model describes how to automatically monitor and collect
context data and usability metrics, how those data can be processed for
analysis support and how users' impressions can be collected. An infrastructure
is provided to implement the model allowing it to be plugged into any
smartphone Android-based application. To evaluate our proposal, we performed a
field experiment, with 21 users using three mobile applications during a
6-month period, in their day-to-day scenarios. Keywords: Usability Evaluation; Smartphone Application; Remote Usability Evaluation;
Usability Testing | |||
| Methods towards API Usability: A Structural Analysis of Usability Problem Categories | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 164-180 | |
| Thomas Grill; Ondrej Polacek; Manfred Tscheligi | |||
| The usability of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is one of the
main factors defining the success of a software based framework. Research in
the area of human computer interaction (HCI) currently mainly focuses on
end-user usability and only little research has been done regarding the
usability of APIs. In this paper, we present a methodology on how to use and
combine HCI methods with the goal to evaluate the usability of APIs. The
methodology consist of three phases - a heuristic evaluation, a developer
workshop and interviews. We setup a case-study according to the methodology, in
which we are evaluating the usability of a service-oriented framework API. The
goal was to explore different HCI methods and compare the applicability of such
methods to find usability problems in an API. The case-study combined
qualitative and quantitative methods in order to investigate the usability and
intuitiveness of the API itself. It allowed us to identify relevant problem
areas for usability related issues that could be mapped to specific types of
HCI methods. Examples for this are e.g. structural problems, which are
identified mainly in inspection methods, while problems regarding errors and
exception handling are mainly identified during the hands-on example part of
the developer workshops conducted. The resulting problem areas allow us to
develop a first classification of API related usability problems that are
making the relevancy of usability issues for APIs more explicit and applicable. Keywords: API; Usability; Contextual Interaction Framework; HCI | |||
| Putting Dementia into Context | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 181-198 | |
| Joël Vogt; Kris Luyten; Jan Van den Bergh; Karin Coninx; Andreas Meier | |||
| People with dementia face a decline of their cognitive functions, including
memory impairment and difficulty to orient in time and space. Assistive
applications can ease the effects of dementia by assuming and supporting
impaired functions. Context-awareness is an accepted paradigm for assistive
applications. It enables interactive systems to react appropriately to
situations that occur during daily routines of people with dementia. However,
there currently is no recommended framework to view symptoms of dementia in
terms of context and context-awareness. The aim of this paper is to inform
designers in the early design stages of assistive applications how requirements
and needs of people with dementia can be represented in a context-aware
application. Based on a systematic literature review, we elicit which context
types are linked to the needs of people with dementia and their caregivers and
how they are used in existing assistive applications in dementia care. Our
focus is on applications evaluated and assessed with people with dementia. We
also classify these assistive applications by the offered context-aware
services. We observe that these should not be limited within the realm of the
local residence; context types that are valuable in-house can, to a certain
extent, also be leveraged outside a local residence. We believe the proposed
framework is a tool for application builders and interface designers to
accomplish an informed design of systems for people with dementia. Keywords: Dementia; Independent living; context-awareness; assistive applications | |||
| Puzzle: A Visual-Based Environment for End User Development in Touch-Based Mobile Phones | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 199-216 | |
| Jose Danado; Fabio Paternò | |||
| Despite the widespread usage of mobile devices there is a lack of
environments able to allow end users to create applications directly in such
devices. In this paper, we present the Puzzle framework, which supports a
visual environment for opportunistically creating mobile applications in
touch-based mobile phones. The user interface is designed to be usable for
mobile users that do not use programming languages in their daily work as well
as to motivate end users to playfully experiment and create applications. In
particular, we report on its user interface, framework and evaluation. Keywords: End user development; ubiquitous computing; mobile computing; authoring
tools | |||
| Requirements Sensemaking Using Concept Maps | | BIBA | Full-Text | 217-232 | |
| Shamal Faily; John Lyle; Andre Paul; Andrea Atzeni; Dieter Blomme; Heiko Desruelle; Krishna Bangalore | |||
| Requirements play an important role in software engineering, but their perceived usefulness means that they often fail to be properly maintained. Traceability is often considered a means for motivating and maintaining requirements, but this is difficult without a better understanding of the requirements themselves. Sensemaking techniques help us get this understanding, but the representations necessary to support it are difficult to create, and scale poorly when dealing with medium to large scale problems. This paper describes how, with the aid of supporting software tools, concept mapping can be used to both make sense of and improve the quality of a requirements specification. We illustrate this approach by using it to update the requirements specification for the EU webinos project, and discuss several findings arising from our results. | |||
| Towards Conflict Management in User Interface Composition Driven by Business Needs | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 233-250 | |
| Anne-Marie Déry-Pinna; Audrey Occello; Michel Riveill | |||
| This paper presents a composition engine that handles User interface (UI) in
the context of application composition. The aim is to detect and manage
conflicts that may arise when composing UI driven by business needs. The
originality of this composition engine is to reason at an Abstract level which
simplifies the composition algorithm and makes it reusable and oblivious to
technology. The composition engine is the core of the Alias framework that
reduces the re-engineering efforts needed to obtain the UI of an application
built by composition of smaller ones following the "programming in the large"
paradigm. Keywords: User Interface composition; functional composition; composition conflicts | |||
| A Model for Assessing Organizational Learning in Software Development Organizations | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 251-258 | |
| Oumout Chouseinoglou; Semih Bilgen | |||
| In order to keep up with the continuously increasing competition and to
obtain competitive advantage, software developer organizations (SDO) need to
possess the characteristics of Learning Software Organizations (LSO). Maturity
is directly related to both learning and knowledge management (KM). However,
the major software process improvement (SPI) approaches do not explicitly
address how learning capabilities of a SDO can be assessed or what knowledge
needs to be managed and how, when, where, or by and for whom. This paper
introduces a model for evaluating the organizational learning characteristics
of a SDO. We report the results of applying the model in a university course on
software development. Keywords: Learning software organization; software process improvement; SQ4R | |||
| A Personality Based Design Approach Using Subgroup Discovery | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 259-266 | |
| Kay Behrenbruch; Martin Atzmüller; Christoph Evers; Ludger Schmidt; Gerd Stumme; Kurt Geihs | |||
| To facilitate user-centered software engineering, developers need an easy to
grasp understanding of the user. The use of personas helps to keep specific
user needs in mind during the design process. Technology acceptance is of
particular interest for the design of innovative applications previously
unknown to potential users. Therefore, our research focuses on defining a
typology of relevant user characteristics with respect to technology acceptance
and transferring those findings to the description of personas. The presented
work focuses on the statistical relationship between technology acceptance and
personality. We apply sub-group discovery as a statistical tool. Based on the
statistically derived subgroups and patterns we define the mentioned personas
to help developers to understand different forms of technology acceptance. By
integrating the specifically defined personas into existing methods in the
field of software engineering the feasibility of the presented approach is
demonstrated. Keywords: Technology Acceptance; Personality; Software Engineering; Usercentered
Design; Subgroup Discovery | |||
| Assessing Use Complexity of Software: A Tool for Documentation Designers | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 267-274 | |
| Brigit van Loggem | |||
| One way to support end users of software is to provide documentation
materials such as user manuals and online Help. As not all software is equally
difficult to master, documentation designers need to determine the quality and
quantity of the information to be included in the user documentation. A first
step towards this end would be to assess the complexity of the software from
the user's point of view. This paper suggests one approach to such an
assessment, based on the idea of use complexity as a multi-dimensional
construct. A consideration of width, depth and height of use complexity can
help designers determine documentation requirements. Keywords: user documentation; use complexity; documentation design | |||
| Collecting Users Profiles for Web Applications | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 275-282 | |
| Amin Rasooli; Peter Forbrig; Fattaneh Tagivareh | |||
| Currently providers are trying to personalize their websites according to
user profiles. With respect to the wide variety and great volume of websites,
providers look for a design that is more attractive than that of competitors.
They look for a unique solution. In this uniqueness, any point such as design,
user-friendliness, and content offered to the customer plays a key role in its
success. The main objective of this study is to provide profiles of different
kinds of users. Later on, this information can be used to design appropriate
websites. This kind of information can be explored from social networks. We
obtained a dataset of 500 users and we have clustered this dataset to 12
clusters, and then applied Collaborative Filtering on user data to improve the
results. The paper will present the corresponding results and provide an
interesting overview of different profiles of users in different parts of the
world. Keywords: User Profiles; Web Application; Personalization; Web Design | |||
| Creativity Patterns Guide: Support for the Application of Creativity Techniques in Requirements Engineering | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 283-290 | |
| Elton R. Vieira; Carina Alves; Letícia Duboc | |||
| Creativity techniques are tools for stimulating creative thinking. The
importance of creativity fostering techniques in software development has been
recognized and investigated by researchers for over a decade, yet the greater
software engineering (SE) community makes little use of the myriads of
techniques available. In order to encourage a wider adoption and to support the
use of creativity techniques in software development, we have reviewed a large
number of creativity techniques and have created a Creativity Patterns Guide.
This paper describes the part of the guide tailored for the requirements
engineering phase. The guide has been evaluated in real-world projects. Keywords: Creativity Techniques; Requirements Engineering; Design Patterns | |||
| Exploring Local Cultural Perspectives in User Interface Development in an Indian Offshoring Context: A View from the UK | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 291-298 | |
| Malte Ressin; Cecilia Oyugi; José Abdelnour-Nocera; David Lee; Dharam Panesar | |||
| In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory case study on the
impact of culture on software development in an offshoring context in India.
Our research aims to understand the role of culture in outsourced software
development. We interviewed human-computer interface professionals such as
frontend developers, user interface designers and usability specialists working
for a software development outsourcing vendor in India. The interviews were
analysed for occurrence of common themes. Thereafter the cultural models of
Hofstede and Hall were used to make sense of these emerging themes.. Our
results indicate that cultural influence occurs and has an overarching
influence in software development. Three proposals are made in response to the
cultural issues highlighted. Keywords: offshoring; outsourcing; culture; software development | |||
| Improving Support for Visual Task Modelling | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 299-306 | |
| Fabio Paternò; Carmen Santoro; Lucio Davide Spano | |||
| ConcurTaskTrees (CTT) and its supporting environment (CTTE) have been widely
used for a significant period of time. However, users have expressed various
concerns regarding their usability. In this paper, we present the modifications
made so as to provide more effective support. In particular, the environment
has been enhanced in order to make it more suitable for designing real-world
applications, including improved support for task model editing and early
prototype generation. We also report on two evaluation tests that provided
useful feedback in order to decide how to improve the environment. Keywords: Task models; Visual Tool Support; CTT | |||
| Integrating Usability Evaluation into Model-Driven Video Game Development | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 307-314 | |
| Adrian Fernandez; Emilio Insfran; Silvia Abrahão; José Ángel Carsí; Emanuel Montero | |||
| The increasing complexity of video game development highlights the need of
design and evaluation methods for enhancing quality and reducing time and cost.
In this context, Model-Driven Development approaches seem to be very promising
since a video game can be obtained by transforming platform-independent models
into platform-specific models that can be in turn transformed into code.
Although this approach is started to being used for video game development,
there is a need for usability evaluation methods specifically tailored to this
type of development process. In this paper, we present a usability inspection
method that can be used along all the stages of the model-driven video game
development. The method relies on a Usability Model that is aligned with the
ISO/IEC 25010 (SQuaRE) standard and decomposes usability into measurable
attributes and metrics specific for the video game domain. Keywords: Video Game; Usability Inspection; Model-Driven Development | |||
| Lessons Learned from Evaluating the Usability of Mobile Spreadsheet Applications | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 315-322 | |
| Derek Flood; Rachel Harrison; Claudia Iacob | |||
| It is estimated that 90% of all the analysts in business perform
calculations on spreadsheets. Due to advances in technology, spreadsheet
applications can now be used on mobile devices and several such applications
are available for platforms such as Android and iOS. Research on spreadsheets
revolves around several themes, but little work has been done in evaluating the
usability of such applications (desktop or mobile). This paper presents lessons
learned and usability guidelines derived from laboratory usability testing of
mobile spreadsheet applications. Twelve participants were given a task to be
solved using a mobile spreadsheet application and based on the video recordings
of their interactions with the application patterns of recurring actions and
sequences of actions were derived. Navigation, selection, feedback, and
transparency of features were some of the main themes in the results of the
testing, pointing to a set of guidelines which are also generalizable across
other types of mobile applications. Keywords: Mobile applications; usability guidelines | |||
| ProtoTask, New Task Model Simulator | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 323-330 | |
| Lachaume Thomas; Girard Patrick; Guittet Laurent; Fousse Allan | |||
| One major objective of task modeling is to improve communication between
design stakeholders. Current task model simulators, which require their users
to understand task model notations, and provide for inappropriate information,
are not really suitable for this topic. We designed ProtoTask, which allows the
user to experiment task models by the way of building scenarios, without
understanding task model notations. This tool presents new mechanisms that aim
at facilitating the understanding of task models for all users. Keywords: Task Model; Simulation; Human-Computer Interaction; User Experience | |||
| The Usage of Usability Techniques in Scrum Projects | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 331-341 | |
| Yuan Jia; Marta Kristin Larusdottir; Åsa Cajander | |||
| Over the past decades, usability techniques have been introduced into
software development practices. At the same time many software development
teams have started to use the agile development process -- Scrum -- to plan and
organize their software projects. The focus of this study is to explore how
usability techniques are integrated during software development in Scrum
projects. The most commonly used usability technique in Scrum projects is
workshops, followed by lo-fi prototyping, interviews and meetings with users,
all used by more than half of the participants. The technique that is most
frequently used is lo-fi prototyping used by more than half of the participants
two to four times a month. All these usability techniques are informal, meaning
that these techniques can be used quickly without much preparation. Formal
usability evaluation with users is a highly ranked technique by the
participants but not commonly used by them. Keywords: Keywords: Usability techniques; User centred design; user involvement;
usability; agile software development; Scrum | |||
| Usability Reporting with UsabML | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 342-351 | |
| Johannes Feiner; Keith Andrews | |||
| Usability practitioners conduct formative evaluations, such as heuristic
evaluations and thinking aloud tests, to identify potential problems in a user
interface as part of the iterative design cycle. The findings of a formative
evaluation (in essence, a list of potential problems) are usually compiled into
written reports and typically delivered as a PDF or Word document. A written
report is convenient for reading, but makes it difficult to reuse the findings
electronically. The usability markup language (UsabML) defines a structured
reporting format for the results of usability evaluations. In agile software
development the direct handover of usability findings to software engineers can
speed up development cycles and improve software quality.
Usability managers can now enter the findings of formative evaluations into a new, web-based system called Usability Reporting Manager (URM). Findings can be exported in UsabML format, which in turn can easily be imported by software engineers into an issue-tracking system connected to a source code repository. UsabML can also be transformed into other formats such as HTML and PDF via stylesheets (XSL). Keywords: formative evaluation; usability findings; exchange; XML; reporting format | |||
| Visualizing Sensor Data: Towards an Experiment and Validation Platform | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 352-359 | |
| Claudia C. Gutiérrez Rodriguez; Anne-Marie Déry-Pinna | |||
| In the last decade, technological improvement on sensors increasingly
motivates the use of sensor data in numerous application domains such as
environmental, health, transportation, etc. Progressively, with the advances on
user terminals, there is a strong trend towards interactive sensor data
visualization. As viewing raw sensor data stored in multiple databases does not
specially fulfill user requirements, data visualization raises challenges about
supporting users to easily use and handle sensor data. In this paper, we
address this particular subject with an extensible visualization and
interaction platform. Within this platform, we provide developers the facility
to experiment and validate multiple visualizations for sensor data, specially
based sensor data properties and users' requirements. We illustrate our
platform with a medical study case focused on ECG data visualization. Keywords: Information Visualization; HCI; Sensor Data; Medical Applications;
Experimentation platform | |||
| Graphical Controls Based Environment for User Interface Evaluation | | BIBAK | Full-Text | 360-367 | |
| Selem Charfi; Abdelwaheb Trabelsi; Houcine Ezzedine; Christophe Kolski | |||
| For more than two decades, the HCI community has elaborated numerous tools
for user interface evaluation. Although the related tools are wide, the
evaluation remains a difficult task. This paper presents a new approach for
user interface evaluation. The proposed evaluation process focuses on utility
and usability as software quality factors. It is based on the UI ergonomic
quality inspection as well as the analysis and the study of the Human-Computer
interaction. The proposed approach is mainly based on graphic controls
dedicated to the user interface evaluation. These controls have, on the one
hand, the role to compose graphically the interfaces. On the other hand, they
contribute to the UI evaluation through integrated mechanisms. The evaluation
is structured into two phases. The first consists of a local self-evaluation of
the graphical controls according to a set of ergonomic guidelines. This set is
specified by the evaluator. The second allows an electronic informer to
estimate the interaction between the user interface (graphically composed by
the evaluation based controls) and the user. Keywords: User interface (UI); UI evaluation; utility and usability inspection | |||