Search results for "Usability engineering"
showing 10 items of 21 documents
Usability challenges in digital learning solutions
2015
Usability is a key element in successful software. Ensuring the technical usability of a learning solution enables users to focus on their main task, learning. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the results of heuristic usability evaluations of digital learning solutions. Heuristic evaluations were conducted on 24 digital learning solutions from one country (Finland) and two country groups (Asian countries and Spanish speaking countries) concentrating on the usability of the user interface of each evaluated solution. The main results of this study indicate that a few heuristics cover the majority of all usability problems (UPs) observed in learning solutions, but these heuristics c…
An empirical approach for evaluating the usability of model-driven tools
2013
MDD tools are very useful to draw conceptual models and to automate code generation. Even though this would bring many benefits, wide adoption of MDD tools is not yet a reality. Various research activities are being undertaken to find why and to provide the required solutions. However, insufficient research has been done on a key factor for the acceptance of MDD tools: usability. With the help of end-users, this paper presents a framework to evaluate the usability of MDD tools. The framework will be used as a basis for a family of experiments to get clear insights into the barriers to usability that prevent MDD tools from being widely adopted in industry. To illustrate the applicability of …
Usability Work in Agile Systems Development Practice: A Systematic Review
2013
In this chapter we present the results of a systematic literature review of the recommendations in the existing research literature on usability work in agile systems development. The review contributes by summarizing the literature in light of seven claims about how to integrate usability work into an agile development project. By analyzing the claims we show how the previous literature provides grounds, warrants, backing, rebuttal, and qualification with regard to each of them. From this comprehensive overview of the literature we then discuss a research agenda with a particular focus on how situational factors for the claims must be researched and how this must encompass identified rebut…
Training and Deployment as a Basis for Usability Engineering of Mobile Systems
2008
Usability engineering of mobile systems challenges existing methods and raises new concerns. Usability evaluations are frequently described as a separate discipline and in many cases usability evaluations are separate activities within the design and development of systems. This paper presents a development project where training in and the deployment of a mobile system were used to identify usability problems. The project aimed to develop a mobile system to supporting information processes for workers on building sites. An iterative usability evaluation process was conducted the process was refined and validated using two action research projects. The approach of the research was user-cent…
Usability remote evaluation: METBA system
2012
Usability as well as accessibility is a key aspect in development of human-computer interaction. This paper presents the basis of usability evaluation methodology and reviews the methodology used in empirical studies of usability evaluation for disabled people. Finally, we present a solution (METBA) as a system for managing the information related to evaluation of human behavioral observation contents that is used for the registration and management of the information derived from remote usability evaluation which complements the methodology commonly used in this research area.
Filtering usability data with reference to behavior
2011
No company can stay in business without having a "useful" web presence. The question is how usefullnes can be achieved. Usefullnes in this sense is how attractive and useful it is for the visitors. This can be done by observing the visitors' behavior. Doing this through interviews and observation of users in their living rooms is expensive and in many cases even impractical. So, other means need to be found. This paper presents a tool for the evaluation of usefulness of a web presence by extracting and analyzing information out of its log files. The information extraction can be refined using a set of filters which can be arbitrarily combined by the usability engineer responsible for mainta…
Security, Reliability and Usability of mHealth Environments
2015
Mobile technologies confer mobility and autonomy on patients with the advantage of access to home care and health care services on demand. However, these benefits impose challenges to the future health care services. For instance, computation capacity of a conventional smartphone provides applications and services with sufficient power of calculation and automation to assist in daily life activities and medical purposes. Combined with a user-friendly interface, mobile technologies can be an easy and efficient manner to help people who are in a condition of cognitive deterioration or have a chronic disease which demands a close connection to near family members and/or to health care services.
Towards the Learning Experience Technology Usability framework
2017
The availability of learning technology has increased over past decades; however, severe usability issues that cause adverse effects on the learning experience can be found in many available technologies. Learning solution usability is commonly evaluated by focusing on either technical or pedagogical usability and rarely both. This artificially separates the two important aspects of learning technology usability. This chapter provides a new framework for designing and evaluating learning solutions that synthesizes the above usability types to consider them a part of a complex and dynamic whole comprising of learning, technological design, content-related issues and context. The proposed Lea…
Seeking Technical Debt in Critical Software Development Projects : An Exploratory Field Study
2016
In recent years, the metaphor of technical debt has received considerable attention, especially from the agile community. Still, despite the fact that agile practices are increasingly used in critical domains, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies investigating the occurrence of technical debt in critical software development projects. The results of an exploratory field study conducted across several projects reveal that a variety of business and environmental factors cause the occurrence of technical debt in critical domains. Using Grounded Theory method, these factors are categorized as ambiguity of requirement, diversity of projects, inadequate knowledge management, and res…
Supporting Agile Development by Facilitating Natural User Interaction with Executable Formal Specifications
2011
Agile development benefits from fast feedback from various stakeholders. If implemented in a suitable way, formal methods can enhance the agile development process. With an executable formal specification, it is possible to analyse and simulate the behaviour of the target system before it is being built. However, for the users' and developers' natural participation in the development process, it is necessary to use a real end-user interface and bind it to the execution environment being used in the simulations and animations. This requires, though, that the execution model used to simulate the specification is appropriately changed to facilitate the use of these user interfaces. The authors…