鱼眼菜单可用性研究

为了全面把握鱼眼菜单的特性,通过可用性测试,对鱼眼菜单、级联式菜单和单列菜单进行了比较.比较结果表明,鱼眼菜单在很多方面具有一定的优势.鱼眼菜单的布局方式使得用户便于发现目标菜单项,比较适合长的菜单项的选择,在视觉效果上能激发用户的兴趣;但同时也发现了一个明显的不足,即选择目标菜单项比较困难.针对该不足,提出了对鱼眼菜...     

用MIDP2．0 GAME API对手机游戏进行优化开发

文中主要研究了J2ME开发技术中MIDP 2.0游戏开发包的使用和J2ME手机游戏的优化方法与技巧,对上海美通公司提供的五款不完善的手机游戏进行了优化和改进.原游戏包一味使用面向对象技术,使用了过多的类嵌套,这样就不可避免地造成类膨胀,产生大量的、无用的重复代码,增加了系统开销,大大降低了程序的效率.文中采取的主要优化策略是尽可能地使用有限的面向对象的方法,尽可能地使用结构化编程的方法,移除不必要的继承关系、多余的类和接口,查找游戏的瓶颈,对游戏程序使用混淆器,以减少系统的开销,提高游戏的运行性能.经过测试,证明采取的优化策略是完全可行的.     

Usability inspection of digital libraries: a case study

This paper reports a case study about lessons learned and usability issues encountered in a usability inspection of a digital library system called the Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL). Using a co-discovery technique with a team of three expert usability inspectors (the authors), we performed a usability inspection driven by a broad set of anticipated user tasks. We found many good design features in NCSTRL, but the primary result of a usability inspection is a list of usability problems as candidates for fixing. The resulting problems are organized by usability problem type and by system functionality, with emphasis on the details of problems specific to digital library functions. The resulting usability problem list was used to illustrate a cost/importance analysis technique that trades off importance to fix against cost to fix. The problems are sorted by the ratio of importance to cost, producing a priority ranking for resolution.     

Usability in agile software development: A tertiary study

In the last years the interest in developing research on integration of usability and agile software development has been increasing. The number of systematic literature reviews, systematic mapping studies and non-systematic reviews, related to this thematic has also increased. Nevertheless, there is no analysis on the quality of these published secondary studies, nor is there a consolidated research that brings the answer of how to integrate these two areas. The goal of this paper is to categorize secondary studies related to the integration of usability and agile software development and present a critical analysis on the quality of the selected studies. To accomplish this goal a tertiary study was performed to categorize the related studies selected. Initially 3,065 papers were identified and further narrowed to 14 by applying exclusion criteria and analysis. We classified the selected studies as systematic literature reviews, systematic mapping studies and non-systematic literature reviews to report the data analysis. As a result of this study different forms to integrate usability and agile software development were detected as well as the various challenges that must be overcome for the integration success. Six main categories were identified to represent ways of integrating usability into agile development: processes, techniques, practices, recommendations, principles and different approaches. Regarding to the challenges for the integration seven main categories were also identified: issues related to tests, time, work balance, modularization, feedback, prioritization, and documentation. Although the interest in researching the integration of usability and agile software development has increased in the last years, mostly of the analyzed studies neglected the quality criteria and presented difficulties to use methods to synthetize the research results. Despite this, it has been realized that the integration of usability with agile software development is possible and is strongly aligned with user-centered design. The initial studies indicated a separation of activities and roles into specific tracks with parallel work to treat usability in agile software development, but the trend is no longer to manage and control these activities in separate ways, so new challenges are becoming to appear. Although we have identified several points of tension, the integration does not become unfeasible.     

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.     

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.     

Images of Usability

The term usability is ubiquitous in human–computer interaction, so much so that it is commonly used without definition. Rather than one established meaning of usability, there are, however, multiple images of usability. Although each image provides a partial view, the partiality remains implicit unless confronted with alternative images. This study delineates six images of usability: universal usability, situational usability, perceived usability, hedonic usability, organizational usability, and cultural usability. The different foci of the images provide opportunities for becoming sensitized to manifold aspects of the use of a system and thereby acquiring a genuine understanding of its usability. The six images differ, for example, in the extent to which they include aspects of the outcome of the process of using a system or merely the process of use, whether they involve collaborative use or merely individual use, and in their view of usability as perceived by individuals or shared by groups. Several challenges result from recognizing that usability is a set of images rather than a coherent concept, including a risk of misunderstandings in discussions of usability because participants may assume different images of usability and a need for supplementary methods addressing the collaborative and long-term aspects of usability. Moreover, the images call for extending the scope of practical usability work to include the effects achieved by users during their use of systems for real work.     

Usability laboratories

Abstract

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.     

基于席克定律与费茨定律的菜单可用性研究

针对人机交互界面菜单设计可用性预测问题,以席克定律和费茨定律为建模基础,提出一个全新的菜单交互可用性预测模型。该模型通过设计一种评估用户选择目标菜单项的耗时计算方法,预测对象涵盖从新手到专家所有层次的用户行为。实验结果表明,在用户从新手转换到专家行为的各个阶段,使用该模型预测得到的菜单交互可用性数据与实验测试得到的数据吻合较好,两者相关性达0.968,证明该模型能广泛应用于各类菜单设计过程中的可用性预测工作。     

Component-Specific Usability Testing

This paper presents the results of a meta-analysis carried out on the results of six experiments to support the claim that component-specific usability measures are on average statistically more powerful than overall usability measures when comparing different versions of a part of a system. An increase in test effectiveness implies the need for fewer participants in usability tests that study different versions of a component. Three component-specific measures are presented and analyzed: an objective efficiency measure and two subjective measures, one about the ease-of-use and the other about the users' satisfaction. Whereas the subjective measures are obtained with a questionnaire, the objective efficiency measure is based on the number of user messages received by a component. Besides describing the testing method, this paper also discusses the underlying principles such as layered interaction and multiple negative-feedback loops. The main contribution of the work described is the presentation of component-based usability testing as an alternative for traditional holistic-oriented usability tests. The former is more aligned with the component-based software engineering approach, helping engineers to select the most usable versions of a component.      

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.     

可用性测试平台

阐明了软件可用性测试的重要性及其方法分类,着重说明了用户测试方法的步骤.介绍了所设计的软件可用性测试平台的特点和建设该平台的必要性,通过该平台对鱼眼菜单、单列菜单、级联式菜单进行了可用性测试.在测试用户较少的情况下,实验结果与其它主流实验室的结果相一致,表明了该实验平台的有效性和高效性.最后,对该测试平台可能的改进提出了设想.     

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.     

A Usability Checklist for the Usability Evaluation of Mobile Phone User Interface

In the last decade, the research of the usability of mobile phones has been a newly evolving area with few established methodologies and realistic practices that ensure capturing usability in evaluation. Thus, there exists growing demand to explore appropriate evaluation methodologies that evaluate the usability of mobile phones quickly as well as comprehensively. This study aims to develop a task-based usability checklist based on heuristic evaluations in views of mobile phone user interface (UI) practitioners. A hierarchical structure of UI design elements and usability principles related to mobile phones were developed and then utilized to develop the checklist. To demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed checklist, comparative experiments were conducted on the usability checklist and usability testing. The majority of usability problems found by usability testing and additional problems were discovered by the proposed checklist. It is expected that the usability checklist proposed in this study could be used quickly and efficiently by usability practitioners to evaluate the mobile phone UI in the middle of the mobile phone development process.     

爱普生新一代学习型打印机ME35/ME350

学生们开始了新学年的备战阶段。暑假作业、各项初习,以及即将到来的新学年……孩子们的学习任务更加繁重,家长们为给孩子创造高效的学习环境,是时候选购一台品质合乎需求、后期使用成本也能承受的打印机了。爱普生在今年暑期推出新一代学习型喷墨打印机EpsonME 35及三合一喷墨一体机Epson ME 350,业内最低的29元原装黑墨,为学生一族以及低打印量的用户购买打印机提供了最     

一种基于可用度的Web服务可用性测量模型

Web服务通常运行于一个动态和开放的网络环境中,其底层平台与面向的用户千差万别,这使得Web服务的可用性经常不能得以保证。如何对Web服务可用性进行合理评估并提高服务质量是一个具有挑战性的研究课题。从服务请求者的角度出发,设计一种基于可用度的Web服务可用性测试模型,通过采集原始指标数据对服务质量进行可用度量化评估,为服务请求者选择更佳的Web服务提供参考依据。     

Usability Ratings for Everyday Products Measured With the System Usability Scale

This article characterizes the usability of 14 common, everyday products using the System Usability Scale (SUS). More than 1,000 users were queried about the usability of these products using an online survey methodology. The study employed two novel applications of the SUS. First, participants were not asked to perform specific tasks on these products before rating their usability but were rather asked to assess usability based on their overall integrated experience with a given product. Second, some of the evaluated products were assessed as a class of products (e.g., “microwaves”) rather than a specific make and model, as is typically done. The results show clear distinctions among different products and will provide practitioners and researchers with important known benchmarks as they seek to characterize and describe results from their own usability studies.