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Full-Text Articles in Computer Engineering
Usability Inspection Methods After 15 Years Of Research And Practice, David G. Novick, Tasha Hollingsed
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
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
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
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.