Live Web Usability Lab

The Live Usability Lab provides an exciting format for demonstrating the potential of usability testing to evaluate Web resources from the patron’s perspective. A panel of librarians will use this innovative, interaction-driven method to assess iCONN, to demonstrate the potential and power of user testing, and to engage the audience by illustrating the process with live data instead of canned examples.

A comparative review of water disinfection methods appropriate for developing countries and their efficacy, cost-efficiency, and usability

Developing countries are heavily burdened by limited access to safe drinking water and subsequent water-related diseases. Numerous water treatment interventions combat this public health crisis, encompassing both traditional and less-common methods. Of these, water disinfection serves as an important means to provide safe drinking water. Existing literature discusses a wide range of traditional treatment options and encourages the use of multi-barrier approaches including coagulation-flocculation, filtration, and disinfection. Most sources do not delve into approaches specifically appropriate for developing countries, nor do they exclusively examine water disinfection methods.^ The objective of this review is to focus on an extensive range of chemical, physio-chemical, and physical water disinfection techniques to provide a compilation, description and evaluation of options available. Such an objective provides further understanding and knowledge to better inform water treatment interventions and explores alternate means of water disinfection appropriate for developing countries. Appropriateness for developing countries corresponds to the effectiveness of an available, easy to use disinfection technique at providing safe drinking water at a low cost.^ Among chemical disinfectants, SWS sodium hypochlorite solution is preferred over sodium hypochlorite bleach due to consistent concentrations. Tablet forms are highly recommended chemical disinfectants because they are effective and very easy to use, but also because they are stable. Examples include sodium dichloroisocyanurate, calcium hypochlorite, and chlorine dioxide, which vary in cost depending on location and availability. Among physio-chemical disinfection options, electrolysis which produces mixed oxidants (MIOX) provides a highly effective disinfection option with a higher upfront cost but very low cost over the long term. Among physical disinfection options, solar disinfection (SODIS) applications are effective, but they treat only a fixed volume of water at a time. They come with higher initial costs but very low on-going costs. Additional effective disinfection techniques may be suitable depending on the location, availability and cost.^

Process evaluation of intervention program for prevention of early sexual activity and alcohol use among Hispanic teenagers

Hispanic teens are a high-risk population for initiation of early sexual activity and alcohol use which in turn has numerous social and health consequences. One strategy to address prevention of these behaviors is to implement a capacity building intervention that promotes parent child communication, encompasses their cultural values and community participation. This study describes the process evaluation of a pilot intervention program amongst Hispanic teens and their families living along the Texas-Mexico border. “Girls Lets Talk” is a small group intervention with 10-14 year old teens and their female adult family members that involves education regarding effects of alcohol use and sexual activity as well as activities for monitoring and refusal skills to prevent risky behaviors. Two waves of the program each consisting of at least seven mother daughter dyads were conducted. During the designing process, community advisory board meetings and focus groups were held to review course materials and ensure they were appropriate to the Mexican American culture. Parent and adolescent surveys were administered at the beginning and end of the intervention to assess for psychosocial outcome variables. All sessions received high mean satisfactory scores (mean of 4.00 or better on a five point scale) for both adult and adolescent participants. Qualitative feedback was obtained via debriefing sessions to evaluate experience as well as alter recruitment strategies. A Wilcoxon Sign Rank analysis of the pre and post intervention surveys was done that showed significant changes in some outcome variables such as intentions and confidence for monitoring behaviors for adults and beliefs regarding sexual activity. “Girls Lets Talk” is a promising example of how a process evaluation plan can help develop a theory based health promotion program using the community based participatory research approach. The intervention may also be effective in altering intentions and enhancing self-efficacy among parents and teens in order to decrease risky behaviors such as early sexual activity and alcohol use.^

Usability-Oriented Software Development Process

Usability is the capability of the software product to be understood, learned, used and attractive to the user, when used under specified conditions. Many studies demonstrate the benefits of usability, yet to this day software products continue to exhibit consistently low levels of this quality attribute. Furthermore, poor usability in software systems contributes largely to software failing in actual use. One of the main disciplines involved in usability is that of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Over the past two decades the HCI community has proposed specific features that should be present in applications to improve their usability, yet incorporating them into software continues to be far from trivial for software developers. These difficulties are due to multiple factors, including the high level of abstraction at which these HCI recommendations are made and how far removed they are from actual software implementation. In order to bridge this gap, the Software Engineering community has long proposed software design solutions to help developers include usability features into software, however, the problem remains an open research question. This doctoral thesis addresses the problem of helping software developers include specific usability features into their applications by providing them with a structured and tangible guidance in the form of a process, which we have termed the Usability-Oriented Software Development Process. This process is supported by a set of Software Usability Guidelines that help developers to incorporate a set of eleven usability features with high impact on software design. After developing the Usability-oriented Software Development Process and the Software Usability Guidelines, they have been validated across multiple academic projects and proven to help software developers to include such usability features into their software applications. In doing so, their use significantly reduced development time and improved the quality of the resulting designs of these projects. Furthermore, in this work we propose a software tool to automate the application of the proposed process. In sum, this work contributes to the integration of the Software Engineering and HCI disciplines providing a framework that helps software developers to create usable applications in an efficient way.

Software Design Guidelines for Usability

For years, the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community has crafted usability guidelines that clearly define what characteristics a software system should have in order to be easy to use. However, in the Software Engineering (SE) community keep falling short of successfully incorporating these recommendations into software projects. From a SE perspective, the process of incorporating usability features into software is not always straightforward, as a large number of these features have heavy implications in the underlying software architecture. For example, successfully including an “undo” feature in an application requires the design and implementation of many complex interrelated data structures and functionalities. Our work is focused upon providing developers with a set of software design patterns to assist them in the process of designing more usable software. This would contribute to the proper inclusion of specific usability features with high impact on the software design. Preliminary validation data show that usage of the guidelines also has positive effects on development time and overall software design quality.

Usability Planner: A Tool to Support the Process of Selecting Usability Methods

There is increasing pressure on developers to produce usable systems, which requires the use of appropriate methods to support user centred design during development. There is currently no consistent advice on which methods are appropriate in which circumstances, so the selection of methods relies on individual experience and expertise. Considerable effort is required to collate information from various sources and to understand the applicability of each method in a particular situation. Usability Planner is a tool aimed to support the selection of the most appropriate methods depending on project and organizational constraints. Many of the rules employed are derived from ISO standards, complemented with rules from the authors’ experience.

Introducing usability in a conceptual modeling-based software development process.

Usability plays an important role to satisfy users? needs. There are many recommendations in the HCI literature on how to improve software usability. Our research focuses on such recommendations that affect the system architecture rather than just the interface. However, improving software usability in aspects that affect architecture increases the analyst?s workload and development complexity. This paper proposes a solution based on model-driven development. We propose representing functional usability mechanisms abstractly by means of conceptual primitives. The analyst will use these primitives to incorporate functional usability features at the early stages of the development process. Following the model-driven development paradigm, these features are then automatically transformed into subsequent steps of development, a practice that is hidden from the analyst.

Agile user stories enriched with usability

Usability is a critical quality factor. Therefore, like traditional software teams, agile teams have to address usability to properly catch their users experience. There exists an interesting debate in the agile and usability communities about how to achieve this integration. Our aim is to contribute to this debate by discussing the incorporation of particular usability recommendations into user stories, one of the most popular artifacts for communicating agile requirements. In this paper, we explore the implications of usability for both the structure of and the process for defining user stories. We discuss what changes the incorporation of particular usability issues may introduce in a user story. Although our findings require more empirical validation, we think that they are a good starting point for further research on this line.

Usability Planner: Herramienta para la planificación de técnicas de usabilidad en el ciclo de vida del software

A pesar del creciente interés de las organizaciones por la aplicación de métodos y técnicas de usabilidad en el proceso de desarrollo de software, seleccionar y poner en práctica aquellas técnicas que más se adecuan a las características de un determinado proyecto es una tarea compleja y con un soporte bajo. La diversidad de métodos de usabilidad, su desconocimiento en el mundo profesional y la falta de unas pautas claras para su aplicación en un determinado proyecto están causando que la introducción del Diseño Centrado en el Usuario (UCD, del inglés User Centred Design o DCU en español) en las compañías sea una tarea costosa y compleja. No obstante, las empresas que apuestan por la usabilidad de sus productos se están posicionando por encima del resto al crear sistemas que los usuarios valoran notablemente y por ver incrementadas sus ventas. Jefes de proyecto y consultores, que ven atractivo el desarrollo de sistemas usables, se hallan en un escenario en el que no encuentran un mecanismo sencillo e inmediato para seleccionar y aplicar las técnicas de usabilidad en sus proyectos de forma ágil y estructurada. El criterio para la selección de técnicas y métodos que manejan se basa únicamente en su experiencia profesional y en la bibliografía de numerosos autores. Usability Planner es una aplicación web dirigida a profesionales, estudiantes e investigadores involucrados en el desarrollo de software para ayudar a cambiar este escenario. Su objetivo es dar soporte a la selección de técnicas y métodos de usabilidad en el proceso de desarrollo de software minimizando riesgos y maximizando beneficios.

Development of a Model for Security and Usability

This research addressed the development of a consolidated model designed especially to cover the security and usability attributes of a software product. As a starting point, we built a new usability model on the basis of well-known quality standards and models. We then used an existing security model to analyse the relationship between these two approaches. This analysis consisted of a systematic mapping study of the relationship between security and usability as global quality factors. We identified five relationship types: inverse, direct, relative, one-way inverse, and no relationship. Most authors agree that there is an inverse relationship between security and usability. However, this is not a unanimous finding, and this study unveils a number of open questions, like application domain dependency and the need to explore lower-level relationships between attribute subcharacteristics. In order to clarify the questions raised during the research, we conducted a second systematic mapping to further analyse the finer-grained structure of these factors, such as authentication as a subset of security and user efficiency as a subset of usability. The most relevant finding is that efficiency does not depend on the security level during the authentication process. There are other subfactors that require analysis. Accordingly, this research is the first part of a larger project to develop a full-blown consolidated model for security and usability.

Adding Usability Mechanisms into Agile Requirements: Tool Support with U-Kunagi

The growing interest for integrating agile methodologies and usability has brought various challenges to practitioners. This research focuses on a specific part of these challenges that is related to the integration of usability mechanisms (features such as cancel, undo, warning, etc.) into agile requirements, usually written in the form of user stories. For this aim, a framework has been developed, conformed first by a well-defined modeling language that aims to formalize previous empirical research in the field, models of the impact of usability mechanisms into user stories, and a tool to help practitioners applying them to user stories. Results show that the use of this framework helps agile developers to think about usability from the beginning of the development process, without needing to be an expert in the subject. Our proposal can therefore complement other usability practices to improve the quality of use of software developed using agile methodologies.

Including functional usability features in a Model-Driven Development Method

The Software Engineering (SE) community has historically focused on working with models to represent functionality and persistence, pushing interaction modelling into the background, which has been covered by the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community. Recently, adequately modelling interaction, and specifically usability, is being considered as a key factor for success in user acceptance, making the integration of the SE and HCI communities more necessary. If we focus on the Model-Driven Development (MDD) paradigm, we notice that there is a lack of proposals to deal with usability features from the very first steps of software development process. In general, usability features are manually implemented once the code has been generated from models. This contradicts the MDD paradigm, which claims that all the analysts? effort must be focused on building models, and the code generation is relegated to model to code transformations. Moreover, usability features related to functionality may involve important changes in the system architecture if they are not considered from the early steps. We state that these usability features related to functionality can be represented abstractly in a conceptual model, and their implementation can be carried out automatically.

The usefulness of Usability and User Experience evaluation methods on an e-Learning platform development from a developer's perspective: A case study

The development of a web platform is a complex and interdisciplinary task, where people with different roles such as project manager, designer or developer participate. Different usability and User Experience evaluation methods can be used in each stage of the development life cycle, but not all of them have the same influence in the software development and in the final product or system. This article presents the study of the impact of these methods applied in the context of an e-Learning platform development. The results show that the impact has been strong from a developer's perspective. Developer team members considered that usability and User Experience evaluation allowed them mainly to identify design mistakes, improve the platform's usability and understand the end users and their needs in a better way. Interviews with potential users, clickmaps and scrollmaps were rated as the most useful methods. Finally, these methods were considered unanimously very useful in the context of the entire software development, only comparable to SCRUM meetings and overcoming the rest of involved factors.

Usability analysis of authentication techniques

This document will be divided into two main parts. The first one will be the classification of the authentication techniques. We will search the main electronic databases for papers related to authentication techniques. We will then summarize the related papers and show what classifications they use for the authentication techniques. After all of the documents have been read and summarized we will analyse them and group the authentication techniques into the classifications found. For the second part of the document we will focus on the study of usability attributes in the authentication techniques. This to know how authentications techniques compare to one another based on their usability attributes. We will search the main electronic databases for papers related to the usability attributes of authentication techniques based on the usability definition of ISO/IEC 25010 (SQuaRE) and its attributes. We will then summarize the related papers and show what authentication methods they describe and which usability attributes they measure. After all of the documents have been read and summarized we will analyse them depending on their usability attribute. At the end we will elaborate those results to show which authentication techniques have better usability in terms of a specific usability attribute. This will help practitioners who are interested in using authentication methods but want or need to focus on a specific usability attribute. They will be able to use this as a guide to help them chose the best option that fits their purpose.