Engineering Commons^™

Improving Developers' Understanding Of Regex Denial Of Service Tools Through Anti-Patterns And Fix Strategies, Sk Adnan Hassan, Zainab Aamir, Dongyoon Lee, James C. Davis, Francisco Servant

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Regular expressions are used for diverse purposes, including input validation and firewalls. Unfortunately, they can also lead to a security vulnerability called ReDoS (Regular Expression Denial of Service), caused by a super-linear worst-case execution time during regex matching. Due to the severity and prevalence of ReDoS, past work proposed automatic tools to detect and fix regexes. Although these tools were evaluated in automatic experiments, their usability has not yet been studied; usability has not been a focus of prior work. Our insight is that the usability of existing tools to detect and fix regexes will improve if we complement them …

An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Subjective Mental Workload And Objective Indicators Of User Activity, Greg Byrne

Dissertations

Whilst the concept of physical workload is intuitively understood and readily applicable in system design, the same cannot be said of mental workload (MWL), despite its importance in our increasingly technological society. Despite its origin in the mid 20th century, the very concept of ”mental workload” is still a topic of debate in the literature, although it can be loosely defined as “the amount of mental work necessary for a person to complete a task” (Miller, 1956; Longo, 2014). Several methods have been utilized to measure of MWL, including physiological methods such as neuro-imagery, performance-based metrics, and subjective measures via …

An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Subjective Mental Workload And Objective Indicators Of User Activity, Greg Byrne

Dissertations

Whilst the concept of physical workload is intuitively understood and readily applicable in system design, the same cannot be said of mental workload (MWL), despite its importance in our increasingly technological society. Despite its origin in the mid 20th century, the very concept of ”mental workload” is still a topic of debate in the literature, although it can be loosely defined as “the amount of mental work necessary for a person to complete a task” (Miller, 1956; Longo, 2014). Several methods have been utilized to measure of MWL, including physiological methods such as neuro-imagery, performance-based metrics, and subjective measures via …

Interactive Virtual Training: Implementation For Early Career Teachers To Practice Classroom Behavior Management, Alban Delamarre

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Teachers that are equipped with the skills to manage and prevent disruptive behaviors increase the potential for their students to achieve academically and socially. Student success increases when prevention strategies and effective classroom behavior management (CBM) are implemented in the classroom. However, teachers with less than 5 years of experience, early career teachers (ECTs), are ill equipped to handle disruptive students. ECTs describe disruptive behaviors as a major factor for stress given their limited training in CBM. As a result, disruptive behaviors are reported by ECTs as one of the main reasons for leaving the field.

Virtual training environments (VTEs) …

A User Study Of A Wearable System To Enhance Bystanders’ Facial Privacy, Alfredo J. Perez, Sherali Zeadally, Scott Griffith, Luis Y. Matos Garcia, Jaouad A. Mouloud

Information Science Faculty Publications

The privacy of users and information are becoming increasingly important with the growth and pervasive use of mobile devices such as wearables, mobile phones, drones, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Today many of these mobile devices are equipped with cameras which enable users to take pictures and record videos anytime they need to do so. In many such cases, bystanders’ privacy is not a concern, and as a result, audio and video of bystanders are often captured without their consent. We present results from a user study in which 21 participants were asked to use a wearable system called …

Uga’S Alexander Campbell King Law Library: Phasing In Inclusive Usability Testing, Rachel S. Evans, Marie Mize, Jason Tubinis

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

For years we have offered our EBSCO discovery layer service (EDS) as a secondary search tool in addition to our traditional online catalog (GAVEL) linking to both from the library website. However, the traditional catalog search, also known as “Classic GAVEL”, is always listed first while EDS, also known as “GAVEL & Beyond”, is listed second. Although maintenance has continued for populating EDS with library records on a daily basis, customization for this interface and sharing it with our users has not been prioritized. Before making any decisions related to changing the primary location our users experience when searching the …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of The Gestalt Principles Of Perceptual Observation For Virtual Reality User Interface Design, William Macnamara

Dissertations

There is a lot of interest and excitement surrounding the areas of Virtual Reality and Head-Mounted Displays with the recent releases of devices such as the Oculus Rift, Sony PSVR and the HTC Vive. While much of the focus for these devices has been related to sectors of the entertainment industries, namely the cinema and video game industries, there are many more practical applications for these technologies, with potential benefits in educational, training/simulation, therapeutic and modelling/design software. Developing a set of reliable guidelines for Virtual Reality User Interface Design could play a crucial role in whether the medium successfully integrates …

Evaluating The Usability Of The Laboratory Information System (Lis) In Coombe Hospital And Hail Hospital, Fahad Alanazi

Dissertations

Today, with the rapid evolution of technology, there has also been a rapid development of medical software and systems in hospitals. These systems and software are now being used globally in many hospitals by users of different languages and cultures. Governments and private hospitals pay large sums of money to utilise highly efficient technology. When systems are changed or updated, employees often find it difficult to deal with the characteristics of the new systems. Also, behavioral factors, such as the fear of committing simple errors, might affect system performance and prevent the full utilization of the staff potential. In this …

An Empirical Study Of Open Source Software Usability: The Industrial Perspective, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the use of open source projects by common novice users; Open Source Software (OSS) is thus no longer a reserved arena for software developers and computer gurus. Although user-centered designs are gaining popularity in OSS, usability is still not considered as one of the prime objectives in many design scenarios. In this paper, we analyze industry users’ perception of usability factors, including understandability, learnability, operability and attractiveness, on OSS usability. The research model of this empirical study establishes the relationship between the key usability factors and OSS usability from industrial perspective. In …

Contributors’ Preference In Open Source Software Usability: An Empirical Study, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The fact that the number of users of open source software (OSS) is practically un-limited and that ultimately the software quality is determined by end user’s experience, makes the usability an even more critical quality attribute than it is for proprietary software. With the sharp increase in use of open source projects by both individuals and organizations, the level of usability and related issues must be addressed more seriously. The research model of this empirical investigation studies and establishes the relationship between the key usability factors from contributors’ perspective and OSS usability. A data set of 78 OSS contributors that …

Usability Inspection Methods After 15 Years Of Research And Practice, David G. Novick, Tasha Hollingsed

Departmental Papers (CS)

Usability inspection methods, such as heuristic evaluation, the cognitive walkthrough, formal usability inspections, and the pluralistic usability walkthrough, were introduced fifteen years ago. Since then, these methods, analyses of their comparative effectiveness, and their use have evolved in different ways. In this paper, we track the fortunes of the methods and analyses, looking at which led to use and to further research, and which led to relative methodological dead ends. Heuristic evaluation and the cognitive walkthrough appear to be the most actively used and researched techniques. The pluralistic walkthrough remains a recognized technique, although not the subject of significant further …

Toward A More Accurate View Of When And How People Seek Help With Computer Applications, David G. Novick, Edith Elizalde, Nathaniel Bean

Departmental Papers (CS)

Based on 40 interviews and 11 on-site workplace observations of people using computer applications at work, we confirm that use of printed and on-line help is very low and find that providing greater detail of categories solution methods can present a more realistic picture of users’ behaviors. Observed study participants encountered a usability problem on average about once every 75 minutes and typically spent about a minute looking for a solution. Participants consumed much more time when they were unaware of a direct way of doing something and instead used less effective methods. Comparison of results from different data-collection methods …

Why Don't People Read The Manual?, David G. Novick, Karen Ward

Departmental Papers (CS)

Few users of computer applications seek help from the documentation. This paper reports the results of an empirical study of why this is so and examines how, in real work, users solve their usability problems. Based on in-depth interviews with 25 subjects representing a varied cross-section of users, we find that users do avoid using both paper and online help systems. Few users have paper manuals for the most heavily used applications, but none complained about their lack. Online help is more likely to be consulted than paper manuals, but users are equally likely to report that they solve their …

Usability Over Time, Valerie Mendoza, David G. Novick

Departmental Papers (CS)

Testing of usability could perhaps be more accurately described as testing of learnability. We know more about the problems of novice users than we know of the problems of experienced users. To understand how these problems differ, and to understand how usability problems change as users change from novice to experienced, we conducted a longitudinal study of usability among middle-school teachers creating Web sites. The study looked at the use both the use of documentation and the underlying software, tracking the causes and extent of user frustration over eight weeks. We validated a categorization scheme for frustration episodes. We found …

Root Causes Of Lost Time And User Stress In A Simple Dialog System, Nigel G. Ward, Anais G. Rivera, Karen Ward, David G. Novick

Departmental Papers (CS)

As a priority-setting exercise, we compared interactions between users and a simple spoken dialog system to interactions between users and a human operator. We observed usability events, places in which system behavior differed from human behavior, and for each we noted the impact, root causes, and prospects for improvement. We suggest some priority issues for research, involving not only such core areas as speech recognition and synthesis and language understanding and generation, but also less-studied topics such as adaptive or flexible timeouts, turn-taking and speaking rate.

Website Engagibility: A Step Beyond Usability., Ronan Fitzpatrick, Peter Smith, Brendan O'Shea

Conference papers

There is a continuing need for quality eCommerce websites which satisfy their owner’s perspective of quality of design and visitor’s perspective of quality of use. More particularly there is a need for website owners to be able to specify what constitutes a website that will fully engage site visitors and consequently what needs to be designed into the website in order to insure return on investment. This paper argues that the term usability is inappropriate to quality websites and that website engagibility is a step beyond usability. The paper reports continuing research which seeks to identify the requirements of website …