Search results for "usability"
showing 10 items of 327 documents
Browser independent content based image resizing for liquid web layouts
2010
A typical problem for webdesigners is to realize pages that can be potentially accessed from a number of display devices with different screen sizes and resolutions. Liquid layouts can help for this purpose. However, they can not typically be applied to images, which need to be rescaled or deformed. In both cases usability could be deteriorated. Content-aware image resizing techniques can help for this goal by rescaling the images to the desired width while preserving important image structures. This paper presents a content-aware resizing technique which can be seamlessly integrated into web pages without any effort from the user. The results from the system application prove its effective…
An Evaluation of HCI and CMC in Information Systems within Highly Crowded Large Events
2013
Pervasive systems are composed of a large variety of networked smart devices that supposedly enrich the environment they are deployed in. The access to services provided by a pervasive system should be as natural and “unconscious” as possible. In a large number of cases, the available interaction modality seems to be more oriented towards showing off technological wonders rather than to the actual usability of the interface. In this paper we evaluate and compare two different versions of an information provision system deployed in two editions of a large fair. In particular, we will focus on the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Mediated-Communication (CMC) points of view. The a…
A Multichannel Information System to Build and Deliver Rich User-Experiences in Exhibits and Museums
2011
In this article a multichannel information system to build and deliver rich user experiences in exhibits and museums is presented. The system was designed to use information about a particular exhibit or museum while delivering a wide user experience based on different distribution channels. The overall information is used to build different solutions that can be delivered simultaneously on different media from touch-screen installations to portable devices like smart phones. Moreover, all the devices signed in the environment are able to communicate to each others to increase the level of the usability of the system. A case study and analysis of experimental results are also provided.
Phase Coherence in Conceptual Spaces for Conversational Agents
2010
This chapter attempts to enhance the traditional chatbots with associative/intuitive capabilities. According to these considerations, it tries to create a conversational agent model that takes into consideration, aside from the traditional rule - based dialogue mechanism, also some sort of intuitive reasoning ability. The aim is in attempting to overcome the rigid pattern - matching rules, proposing a "phase coherence" paradigm into a semantic space. With this locution the chapter intend that the vectors representing the elements of the dialogue are coherent with the context. The chapter trust that this intuitive - associative capability can be obtained using the LSA methodology. The repres…
Elicitation and evaluation of zoom gestures for touchless interaction with desktop displays
2019
Touchless gestural interaction has been widely studied and adopted in many contexts. Furthermore, the growing availability of low-cost enabling devices, such as Kinect or Leap Motion, boosted up the interest in such interaction both for commercial and scientific purposes, both for large public displays and for personal displays. The problem of choosing the right touchless gesture for the right action is thus still an open issue, depending on several aspects, such as context, purpose, users' culture, etc. In this work, we first present the results of a gesture elicitation study that allowed us to identify a set of touchless gestures for performing zoom actions while interacting with desktop …
A User-Friendly Interface for Fingerprint Recognition Systems Based on Natural Language Processing
2009
Biometric recognition systems represent a valid solution to the safety problem of internet accessibility, even if they do not always provide an environment easily comprehensible by users and operators with a mid-level of competence. This gap can be partially filled if, instead of using the conventional access routines to the authentication system, the user could simply write to the system through the interface and using high level sentences and requests be able to use its own natural language to reach the intended goal. On the other hand, biometrics features are widely used for recognition and identification all over the world, generating large databases. In this paper a user-friendly inter…
The Psychology of Fluent Use
2016
In a perfect world, it would always be possible to operate technology effortlessly and to reach the desired goal. However, in the real world many factors may make technologies difficult to use or even hinder people from using technical artefacts. Most of these factors pertain to usability (i.e., technology’s ability to fit users’ capabilities) and thus concern technological solutions from the point of view of human beings as users of technology. Therefore, designing technical artefacts that are easy to use requires understanding the psychological and mental preconditions for using technology.
unitas: the universal tool for annotation of small RNAs
2017
AbstractBackgroundNext generation sequencing is a key technique in small RNA biology research that has led to the discovery of functionally different classes of small non-coding RNAs in the past years. However, reliable annotation of the extensive amounts of small non-coding RNA data produced by high-throughput sequencing is time-consuming and requires robust bioinformatics expertise. Moreover, existing tools have a number of shortcomings including a lack of sensitivity under certain conditions, limited number of supported species or detectable sub-classes of small RNAs.ResultsHere we introduce unitas, an out-of-the-box ready software for complete annotation of small RNA sequence datasets, …
Human Technology : Toward the Second Decade
2015
The inaugural issue of Human Technology: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments was published in 2005. The 10 volumes of two to three issues comprise well over 2000 pages. Upon starting as editor in chief in January 2015, I browsed through the archives and noticed that just over 100 articles had been published in the journal. Examining these titles, it is evident that they address a wide variety of topics. Nevertheless, four broad themes emerge: The user of technology, with such foci as user experience, user characteristics, usability, user interface, and, on a more theoretical level, cognition; The learner in a technological environment, covering aspects such as inf…
Open Access Publishing as a Bridge Across the Digital Divide
2007
In today’s world of snappy catchphrases, the complexity of a phenomenon is often hiddenbehind the simplicity of the terminology. Take, for instance, the concept of the digital divide.In short, the term means that there is a gap between those people who have effective access todigital technologies (and all the benefits that brings) and those who do not (Organization forEconomic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2001; Selhofer & Husing, 2002). Whilethe definition seems simple enough, in fact, there are numerous reasons for the technologygap among people in the world. Typical reasons for the digital divide include material access(i.e., no access to a computer, lack of access to specific soft…