Usability evaluation of E-books

The objective of this study is to evaluate the usability of electronic books (E-books). An experiment was designed to compare the differences between reading an E-book and a conventional book (C-book) with objective measures. Twenty junior college students, ages sixteen to eighteen, participated in the study. Response measures included reading performance and critical flicker fusion (CFF). The results indicate that reading an E-book causes significantly higher eye fatigue than reading a C-book. Reading a C-book generated a higher level of reading performance than reading an E-book. In addition, females demonstrated better reading performance than males in reading either book.     

一种防范钓鱼网站的方法

网络钓鱼是在线身份窃取的一种。近年来,网络钓鱼成为了在线身份窃取的主流。要防止网络钓鱼,最重要的是让用户能够识别网站的真伪。本文提出了一种让用户能够有效地识别网站真伪的技术:当用户需要辨别网站真伪时,先输入一个私数,上传到服务器;然后,服务器返回一组与此私数相关的特有的防钓码,用户看到这组防钓码,便知网站真假。由于防钓码因由户给出的私数而异,钓鱼者很难伪造,运用此法可有效的防范钓鱼网站。     

Usability evaluation of multi-modal biometric verification systems

As a result of the evolution in the field of biometrics, a new breed of techniques and methods for user identity recognition and verification has appeared based on the recognition and verification of several biometric features considered unique to each individual. Signature and voice characteristics, facial features, and iris and fingerprint patterns have all been used to identify a person or just to verify that the person is who he/she claims to be. Although still relatively new, these new technologies have already reached a level of development that allows its commercialization. However, there is a lack of studies devoted to the evaluation of these technologies from a user-centered perspective. This paper is intended to promote user-centered design and evaluation of biometric technologies. Towards this end, we have developed a platform to perform empirical evaluations of commercial biometric identity verification systems, including fingerprint, voice and signature verification. In this article, we present an initial empirical study in which we evaluate, compare and try to get insights into the factors that are crucial for the usability of these systems.     

SPP: An anti-phishing single password protocol

Most users have multiple accounts on the Internet where each account is protected by a password. To avoid the headache in remembering and managing a long list of different and unrelated passwords, most users simply use the same password for multiple accounts. Unfortunately, the predominant HTTP basic authentication protocol (even over SSL) makes this common practice remarkably dangerous: an attacker can effectively steal users’ passwords for high-security servers (such as an online banking website) by setting up a malicious server or breaking into a low-security server (such as a high-school alumni website). Furthermore, the HTTP basic authentication protocol is vulnerable to phishing attacks because a client needs to reveal his password to the server that the client wants to login.In this paper, we propose a protocol that allows a client to securely use a single password across multiple servers, and also prevents phishing attacks. Our protocol achieves client authentication without the client revealing his password to the server at any point. Therefore, a compromised server cannot steal a client’s password and replay it to another server.Our protocol is simple, secure, efficient and user-friendly. In terms of simplicity, it only involves three messages. In terms of security, the protocol is secure against the attacks that have been discovered so far including the ones that are difficult to defend, such as the malicious server attacks described above and the recent phishing attacks. Essentially our protocol is an anti-phishing password protocol. In terms of efficiency, each run of our protocol only involves a total of four computations of a one-way hash function. In terms of usability, the protocol requires a user to remember only one password consisting of eight (or more) random characters, and this password can be used for all of his accounts.     

一种新的笔式交互范式的可用性评估

笔式用户界面是Post—WIMP界面的一种重要形态,具有自然、和谐的交互特性。尽管笔式用户界面广泛应用于无处不在计算环境中,但很少专门对它的可用性进行评估。针对笔式用户界面的特征,提出了一种新的笔式用户界面范式,基于此范式设计并实现了一个面向教学的笔式交互系统(PenOffice),利用此系统对范式从易学性、效率、出错率和用户满意度这几个方面进行了可用性评估,从中分析了笔式用户界面以及这种新的界面范式的优点和不足。     

Usability and accessibility evaluation of Libyan government websites

Universal Access in the Information Society - The aim of this study was to evaluate the usability and accessibility of Libyan government websites. A total of ten government websites in Libya were...     

Five-tier barrier anti-phishing scheme using hybrid approach

ABSTRACT

Though hoaxing people to make financial benefits is an old idea, phishers have realized that social engineering tools for web attacks are relatively easy to execute and are highly profitable over the Internet. One of the threatening criminal activities is phishing, in which the phishers trap users into revealing their identities and financial information to a fraudulent website. Researchers have proposed a number of anti-phishing techniques based on blacklist, whitelist, and visual similarity, but the major disadvantage with such approaches is that they are slow techniques with high false positive rates. For robust detection of phishing attacks, this article uses fundamentals of heuristic factors and a whitelist. The article proposes a safeguard scheme referred as the five-tier barrier hybrid approach. Input to the five-tier barrier is a uniform resource locator (URL), and output of the application is a status of the page (“Secure Connection” representing a legitimate URL, “Phishing Alert” representing phishing URL, and “Query Page” representing that the webpage needs to be processed further/failure of JSoup connection). In comparison to a blacklist, the five-tier barrier is competent in detecting zero-hour phishing attacks, and it is much faster than visual similarity–based anti-phishing techniques.     

Usability evaluation of an electric-powered wheelchair driven by eye tracking

Universal Access in the Information Society - Studies indicate an increase in the abandonment rates of the use of Assistive Technology devices for several reasons: the non-participation of the user...     

A recent review of conventional vs. automated cybersecurity anti-phishing techniques

In the era of electronic and mobile commerce, massive numbers of financial transactions are conducted online on daily basis, which created potential fraudulent opportunities. A common fraudulent activity that involves creating a replica of a trustful website to deceive users and illegally obtain their credentials is website phishing. Website phishing is a serious online fraud, costing banks, online users, governments, and other organisations severe financial damages. One conventional approach to combat phishing is to raise awareness and educate novice users on the different tactics utilised by phishers by conducting periodic training or workshops. However, this approach has been criticised of being not cost effective as phishing tactics are constantly changing besides it may require high operational cost. Another anti-phishing approach is to legislate or amend existing cyber security laws that persecute online fraudsters without minimising its severity. A more promising anti-phishing approach is to prevent phishing attacks using intelligent machine learning (ML) technology. Using this technology, a classification system is integrated in the browser in which it will detect phishing activities and communicate these with the end user. This paper reviews and critically analyses legal, training, educational and intelligent anti-phishing approaches. More importantly, ways to combat phishing by intelligent and conventional are highlighted, besides revealing these approaches differences, similarities and positive and negative aspects from the user and performance prospective. Different stakeholders such as computer security experts, researchers in web security as well as business owners may likely benefit from this review on website phishing.     

Usability risk level evaluation for physical user interface of mobile phone

The mobile phone has become an indispensable device in everyday life. However, many usability problems were generated by the multi-functionality of mobile phones. There was an important increase on the user interface (UI) design and usability. With the introduction of a variety of forms and keypads in mobile phones, the user's need of controllability, grip-stability, and usability were raised in the UI aspect. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the physical user interface (PUI) elements of mobile phones, and defined the degree of usability risk such as key level value, function level value, and grip level value. Also, this study proposed an evaluation framework to quantitatively measure the usability risk in the mobile phone PUI elements. For this, the mobile phone PUI elements were analyzed and classified by key type, function, and form-factor. Hence, in the case study was investigated and evaluated 133 mobile phones in the market by the proposed framework. As a result, the proposed evaluation framework enabled the measurement of the mobile phone usability risk level in the early stages of the concept design. This made possible the prediction of design problems related with the mobile phone PUI.     

Usability evaluation methods for the web: A systematic mapping study

Context

In recent years, many usability evaluation methods (UEMs) have been employed to evaluate Web applications. However, many of these applications still do not meet most customers’ usability expectations and many companies have folded as a result of not considering Web usability issues. No studies currently exist with regard to either the use of usability evaluation methods for the Web or the benefits they bring.

Objective

The objective of this paper is to summarize the current knowledge that is available as regards the usability evaluation methods (UEMs) that have been employed to evaluate Web applications over the last 14 years.

Method

A systematic mapping study was performed to assess the UEMs that have been used by researchers to evaluate Web applications and their relation to the Web development process. Systematic mapping studies are useful for categorizing and summarizing the existing information concerning a research question in an unbiased manner.

Results

The results show that around 39% of the papers reviewed reported the use of evaluation methods that had been specifically crafted for the Web. The results also show that the type of method most widely used was that of User Testing. The results identify several research gaps, such as the fact that around 90% of the studies applied evaluations during the implementation phase of the Web application development, which is the most costly phase in which to perform changes. A list of the UEMs that were found is also provided in order to guide novice usability practitioners.

Conclusions

From an initial set of 2703 papers, a total of 206 research papers were selected for the mapping study. The results obtained allowed us to reach conclusions concerning the state-of-the-art of UEMs for evaluating Web applications. This allowed us to identify several research gaps, which subsequently provided us with a framework in which new research activities can be more appropriately positioned, and from which useful information for novice usability practitioners can be extracted.     

Work-domain knowledge in usability evaluation: Experiences with Cooperative Usability Testing

Usability evaluation helps to determine whether interactive systems support users in their work tasks. However, knowledge about those tasks and, more generally, about the work-domain is difficult to bring to bear on the processes and outcome of usability evaluation. One way to include such work-domain knowledge might be Cooperative Usability Testing, an evaluation method that consists of (a) interaction phases, similar to classic usability testing, and (b) interpretation phases, where the test participant and the moderator discuss incidents and experiences from the interaction phases. We have studied whether such interpretation phases improve the relevance of usability evaluations in the development of work-domain specific systems. The study included two development cases. We conclude that the interpretation phases generate additional insight and redesign suggestions related to observed usability problems. Also, the interpretation phases generate a substantial proportion of new usability issues, thereby providing a richer evaluation output. Feedback from the developers of the evaluated systems indicates that the usability issues that are generated in the interpretation phases have substantial impact on the software development process. The benefits of the interpretation phases may be explained by the access these provide both to the test participants’ work-domain knowledge and to their experiences as users.     

Usability evaluation of a virtual reality smartphone app for a living museum

This paper elaborates the empirical evidence of a usability evaluation of a VR and non-VR virtual tour application for a living museum. The System Usability Scale (SUS) was used in between participants experiments (Group 1: non-VR version and Group 2: VR version) with 40 participants. The results show that the mean scores of all components for the VR version are higher compared to the non-VR version, overall SUS score (72.10 vs 68.10), usability score (75.50 vs 71.70), and learnability (58.40 vs 57.00). Further analysis using a two-tailed independent t test showed no difference between the non-VR and VR versions. Additionally, no significant difference was observed between the groups in the context of gender, nationality, and prior experience (other VR tour applications) for overall SUS score, usability score, and learnability score. Α two-tailed independent t test indicated no significant difference in the usability score between participants with VR experience and no VR experience. However, a significant difference was found between participants with VR experience and no VR experience for both SUS score (t(38) = 2.17, p = 0.037) and learnability score (t(38) = 2.40, p = 0.021). The independent t test results indicated a significant difference between participant with and without previous visits to SCV for the usability score (t(38) = −2.31, p = 0.027), while there was no significant differences observed in other components. It can be concluded that both versions passed based on the SUS score. However, the sub-scale usability and learnability scores indicated some usability issue.

     

Security Usability

In the security community, we’ve always recognized that our security proposals come with certain costs in terms of usability. Traditionally, that’s the compromise we make to get security. But the market has ruled against us. Time and time again, our fielded secure systems are ignored, bypassed, turned off, or constrained to such a small part of the process that the security result is practically nonexistent. Even worse for our mental self-satisfaction, those systems that claim to deliver security to users simply don’t pass muster--they’re not what we’d like to think of as secure systems.     

Usability laboratories

This article provides a table with summary statistics for the thirteen usability laboratories described in the papers in this special issue. It also gives an introduction to the main uses of usability laboratories in usability engineering and surveys some of the issues related to practical use of user testing and CAUSE tools for computer-aided usability engineering.     

Usability evaluation of symbols in digital cluster for drivers with color vision deficiency

Universal Access in the Information Society - Digital clusters have been adopted as displays in vehicles, and various driving information is presented through the digital clusters with different...