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Full-Text Articles in Computer Engineering
Usability Over Time, Valerie Mendoza, David G. Novick
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
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.