Improving search engine interfaces for blind users: a case study

This article describes a research project aimed at improving search engine usability for sightless persons who use assistive technology to navigate the web. At the beginning of this research, a preliminary study was performed concerning accessibility and usability of search tools, and eight guidelines were formulated for designing search engine user interfaces. Then, the derived guidelines were applied in modifying the source code of Google’s interface, while maintaining the same look and feel, in order to demonstrate that with very little effort it is possible to make interaction easier, more efficient, and less frustrating for sightless individuals. After providing a general overview of the project, the paper focuses on interface design and implementation.     

Aggregation of web search engines based on users’ preferences in WebFusion

The required information of users is distributed in the databases of various search engines. It is inconvenient and inefficient for an ordinary user to invoke multiple search engines and identify useful documents from the returned results. Meta-search engines could provide a unified access for their users. In this paper, a novel meta-search engine, named as WebFusion, is introduced. WebFusion learns the expertness of the underlying search engines in a certain category based on the users’ preferences. It also uses the “click-through data concept” to give a content-oriented ranking score to each result page. Click-through data concept is the implicit feedback of the users’ preferences, which is also used as a reinforcement signal in the learning process, to predict the users’ preferences and reduces the seeking time in the returned results list. The decision lists of underling search engines have been fused using ordered weighted averaging (OWA) approach and the application of optimistic operator as weightening function has been investigated. Moreover, the results of this approach have been compared with those achieve by some popular meta-search engines such as ProFusion and MetaCrawler. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement on average click rate, and the variance of clicks as well as average relevancy criterion.     

User reactions to search engines logos: investigating brand knowledge of web search engines

In this work, we investigate consumer reaction to web search engine logos. Our research is motivated by a small number of search engines dominating a market in which there are little switching costs. The major research goal is to investigate the effect that brand logos have on search engine brand knowledge, which includes brand image and brand awareness. To investigate this goal, we employ a survey of 207 participants and use a mixed method approach of sentiment analysis and mutual information statistic to investigate our research questions. Our findings reveal that some search engines have logos that do not communicate a clear meaning, resulting in a confused brand message. Brand image varies among the top search engines, with consumers possessing generally extremely positive or negative brand opinions. Google elicited a string of positive comments from the participants, to the point of several uses of the term ‘love.’ This is in line with the ultimate brand equity that Google has achieved (i.e., the generic term for web search). Most of the other search engines, including Microsoft, had primarily negative terms associated with them, although AOL, Ask, and Yahoo! had a mix of both positive and negative comments. Implications are that the brand logo may be an important interplay component with the technology for both established search engines and those entering the market.     

Municipal web sites accessibility and usability for blind users: preliminary results from a pilot study

Despite the existing regulations and standards at national and international level, web content is still difficult to use, if not completely unusable, for visually impaired people. This paper presents the evaluation results for three municipal web sites. A combined method, based on conformance review and expert review, was employed. Overall, the results reveal a low conformance to WCAG2 and many accessibility and usability problems. The content is not properly structured, and this reduces usability even for sighted user. The analysis of the evaluation data suggests that many accessibility barriers could be avoided by adopting a user-centered approach during web design.     

The effect of design on the usability and real world effectiveness of medical devices: A case study with adolescent users

Adolescents are currently overlooked in many fields of healthcare research and as a result are often required to use medical devices that have been designed for use by either children or adults. This can lead to poor adherence and a reduction in health outcomes.     

A procedure for constructing social network using Web search engines: the case for Japanese automotive industry

Recently, search engines have enabled us to access immense quantities of useful information in an instant. In this paper, we propose a procedure for analyzing the social relationship and structure using Web search engines, which includes novel ways to create a search query and to use the number of hits. This allows us to construct various networks that reflect directed and undirected relationships among actors under arbitrary contexts. As a case study for evaluations of the proposed procedure, we focus on 50 companies belonging to the automotive industry in Japan. We constructed several directed and undirected networks under different temporal and geographical contexts. It is shown that we can acquire a general understanding of the industrial community through the analyses of these created networks and their centrality measures.     

An empirical study of factors affecting the perceived usability of websites for student Internet users

This study analysed Student Internet Users’ (SIUs’) perception of Web usability. Adopting a user testing method, seven Web Usability Factors (WUFs) were tested for their significance in affecting the ease of use of website. Several elements in websites were also tested for their significance in affecting the WUFs. Result shows the most significant WUF is related to the aesthetic appeal of a website, i.e., Use of Colour and Font. However, it was found that most Web developers are not focusing on this important WUF. Elements such as site map, site search, product image catalogue and others were also found to positively affect SIUs’ perception of the WUFs. The results presented in this paper can be used as guidelines for designing usable websites for SIUs.     

Designing a usability lab: a case study from Taligent

Abstract

This paper describes Taligent's current user studies facility and the process we followed to upgrade and redesign our lab to n more functional usability laboratory. The paper begins with the existing studies lab at Taligent, Inc. Next, we continue with the redesign process. Our group is moving to a new building so this gave us the opportunity to request more space for our lab and include additional features. Finally, we outline our design process as well as our design goals for our new facility.     

Immediate usability: a case study of public access design for a community photo library

This paper describes a novel instantiation of a digital photo library in a public access system. It demonstrates how designers can utilize characteristics of a target user community (social constraints, trust, and a lack of anonymity) to provide capabilities, such as unrestricted annotation and uploading of photos, which would be impractical in other types of public access systems. It also presents a compact set of design principles and guidelines for ensuring the immediate usability of public access information systems. These principles and guidelines were derived from our experience developing PhotoFinder Kiosk, a community photo library. Attendees of a major HCI conference (CHI 2001 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) successfully used the tool to browse and annotate collections of photographs spanning 20 years of HCI-related conferences, producing a richly annotated photo history of the field of human–computer interaction. Observations and usage log data were used to evaluate the tool and develop the guidelines. They provide specific guidance for practitioners, as well as a useful framework for additional research in public access interfaces.     

Automatic recognition of handwritten medical forms for search engines

A new paradigm, which models the relationships between handwriting and topic categories, in the context of medical forms, is presented. The ultimate goals are: (1) a robust method which categorizes medical forms into specified categories, and (2) the use of such information for practical applications such as an improved recognition of medical handwriting or retrieval of medical forms as in a search engine. Medical forms have diverse, complex and large lexicons consisting of English, Medical and Pharmacology corpus. Our technique shows that a few recognized characters, returned by handwriting recognition, can be used to construct a linguistic model capable of representing a medical topic category. This allows (1) a reduced lexicon to be constructed, thereby improving handwriting recognition performance, and (2) PCR (Pre-Hospital Care Report) forms to be tagged with a topic category and subsequently searched by information retrieval systems. We present an improvement of over 7% in raw recognition rate and a mean average precision of 0.28 over a set of 1,175 queries on a data set of unconstrained handwritten medical forms filled in emergency environments. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.     

Defining the Web: the politics of search engines

Although the Web itself might truthfully claim a sovereign disinterested and unbiased attitude toward the people who use it, the authors claim that search engines, the tools that navigate the astronomical number of pages (800 million and counting), favor popular, wealthy, and powerful sites at the expense of others. Some researchers have estimated that, taken individually, none of the Web search engines studied indexes more than 16 percent of the total indexable Web. Combined, the results from all search engines they studied covered only about 42 percent of the Web. But what about those portions of the Web that remain hidden from view? The article looks at how search engine developers, designers, and producers grapple with the technical limits that restrict what their engines can find. The authors also examine influences that may determine systematic inclusion and exclusion of certain sites, and the wide-ranging factors that dictate systematic prominence for some sites while relegating others to systematic invisibility     

A virtual reality approach for usability assessment: case study on a wheelchair-mounted robot manipulator

The aim of the paper is to address an innovative methodology for assessing the usability of a product. This methodology is particularly suitable for designing products that provide their main functions through their control interfaces. In particular, this case study relates to the usability assessment of two control devices for a wheelchair-mounted robot manipulator to assist physically disabled people. The study focuses on defining a synthetic usability index on the basis of two currently used methods: the multi criteria decision analysis and the Saaty’s analytic hierarchy process. Several virtual reality (VR)-based experiments have been conducted, set up in accordance with a cross-array experimental plan, that adequately caters for both control and noise factors. Quantitative measures and subjective user evaluations have been collected to maximize the effectiveness, the efficiency and the satisfaction perceived by users while using the product. Compared to the literature on the subject, the proposed approach provides both more flexibility in defining quantitative indexes and more adequate results, even when involving only a small sample of users in the participatory design session. The use of VR technologies for the collection of the experimental data has been essential in terms of safety, costs and repeatability of the tests, as well as of the robustness with respect to noise factors.     

Accessible smartphones for blind users: A case study for a wayfinding system

While progress on assistive technologies have been made, some blind users still face several problems opening and using basic functionalities when interacting with touch interfaces. Sometimes, people with visual impairments may also have problems navigating autonomously, without personal assistance, especially in unknown environments. This paper presents a complete solution to manage the basic functions of a smartphone and to guide users using a wayfinding application. This way, a blind user could go to work from his home in an autonomous way using an adaptable wayfinding application on his smartphone. The wayfinding application combines text, map, auditory and tactile feedback for providing the information. Eighteen visually impaired users tested the application. Preliminary results from this study show that blind people and limited vision users can effectively use the wayfinding application without help. The evaluation also confirms the usefulness of extending the vibration feedback to convey distance information as well as directional information. The validation was successful for iOS and Android devices.     

Transfer learning of syntactic structures for building taxonomies for search engines

We apply a paradigm of transfer learning to build a taxonomy of entities intended to improve search engine relevance in a vertical domain. The taxonomy construction process starts from the seed entities and mines available source domains for new entities associated with these seed entities. New entities are formed by applying the machine learning of syntactic parse trees (their generalizations) to the search results for existing entities to form commonalities between them. These commonality expressions then form parameters of existing entities, and are turned into new entities at the next learning iteration. To match natural language expressions between source and target domains, we use syntactic generalization, an operation which finds a set of maximal common sub-trees of constituency parse trees of these expressions.Taxonomy and syntactic generalization are applied to relevance improvement in search and text similarity assessment. We conduct an evaluation of the search relevance improvement in vertical and horizontal domains and observe significant contribution of the learned taxonomy in the former, and a noticeable contribution of a hybrid system in the latter domain. We also perform industrial evaluation of taxonomy and syntactic generalization-based text relevance assessment and conclude that a proposed algorithm for automated taxonomy learning is suitable for integration into industrial systems. The proposed algorithm is implemented as a component of Apache OpenNLP project.     

A new method for automatic performance comparison of search engines

In this paper, we present a new method for automatically comparing the performance, such as precision, of search engines. Based on queries randomly selected from a specific domain of interest, the method uses robots to automatically query the target search engines, evaluates the relevance of the returned links to the query either automatically based on the vector space model or manually, and then applies statistic measures, including the probability of win and the Friedman statistic, to compare the performance of search engines. We show the experimental results of the new method on three search engines, AltaVista, Google, and InfoSeek. The method arrived at the same performance comparison result in applying either the automatic relevance evaluation method or the manual method. In addition, our results show that the probability of win is a better metric than the Friedman statistic in performance comparison. The advantage of the new method is that it is fast, flexible, consistent, and can adapt to the fast changing search engines.     

Playing stupid, caring for users, and putting on a good show: Feminist acts in usability study work

As a feminist HCI agenda develops, feminist analyses of behaviour must venture beyond the dominant liberal feminist approach to include other feminist approaches. Using the personal narrative or auto-ethnographic method, this article explores the role of gender in usability work, a common research practice in HCI. In this article, the author interprets three gendered behaviours that occur in usability work - playing stupid, caring for and about users, and putting on a good show - demonstrating that while these behaviours appear anti-feminist in a liberal feminist framework, they appear feminist in alternative feminist frameworks, such as relational/care-giving, sex-positive, multicultural, post-colonial and Third Wave. The article demonstrates how a feminist HCI agenda that embraces the multiplicity of feminisms necessarily forces a re-examination of usability work’s relationship to both feminism and HCI research methods.