An evaluation of web-based voting usability and accessibility

Several countries are considering web-based voting as an alternative to, or a replacement of, traditional voting methods. It is argued that electronic voting could increase voter participation and help strengthen democracy, as e-voting would increase accessibility for large sections of the population, particularly with regard to groups that previously have experienced difficulties with the traditional voting setup. With a focus on usability and accessibility, this paper reports on a study evaluating several electronic voting prototypes in Norway, involving technical aspects as well as expert evaluation and user testing in the field, with users from a wide range of disabled user groups participating in the study. Technical testing regarding accessibility standard compliance, testing with the personas method and user testing revealed that many rather basic universal design principles were either not fully understood or not prioritized for implementation by the solution providers. However, despite various accessibility difficulties, the participants generally showed a positive attitude towards web-based elections. Through the findings of this study, the authors highlight factors that are important to consider in the development and testing of web-based voting systems.     

New techniques for usability evaluation of mobile systems

Usability evaluation of systems for mobile computers and devices is an emerging area of research. This paper presents and evaluates six techniques for evaluating the usability of mobile computer systems in laboratory settings. The purpose of these techniques is to facilitate systematic data collection in a controlled environment and support the identification of usability problems that are experienced in mobile use. The proposed techniques involve various aspects of physical motion combined with either needs for navigation in physical space or division of attention. The six techniques are evaluated through two usability experiments where walking in a pedestrian street was used as a reference. Each of the proposed techniques had some similarities to testing in the pedestrian street, but none of them turned out to be completely comparable to that form of field-evaluation. Seating the test subjects at a table supported identification of significantly more usability problems than any of the other proposed techniques. However a large number of the additional problems identified using this technique were categorized as cosmetic. When increasing the amount of physical activity, the test subjects also experienced a significantly increased subjective workload.     

A multiplatform methodology: developing mobile device applications

When the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the American University of Beirut decided to launch a computing course on mobile computing devices, the author designed a course to meet industry requirements and to introduce students to the major platforms used to build practical applications. He dedicated much of Pervasive Computing Systems and Applications, EECE 679, to teaching mobile device application programming through code demonstrations and in-class application building. The course also covered front-end mobile device technologies and back-end infrastructures. Today, many pervasive computing courses focus on research and theory. Those that do deal with developing mobile applications often limit their coverage to a specific platform. This course covers practical and theoretical pervasive computing, lets students acquire hands-on application-building experience in multiple platforms, and acquaints students with recent developments in related technologies and research. The course includes a mix of lectures, code demonstrations, and student presentations.     

An efficient model-based methodology for developing device-independent mobile applications

Current methodologies for developing mobile applications are mostly based on the application programming interfaces (APIs) offered by the native platform. Hence, most solutions are characterized by a low portability and/or reusability. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology based on a declarative and device-independent approach for developing event-driven mobile applications. The methodology relies on: (i) an abstract mobile device based on the user interface markup language; (ii) a content adaptation mechanism based on user preferences; (iii) a context adaptation mechanism based on a standardized context of delivery; (iv) a uniform set of client-side APIs based on an interface object model; (v) an efficient transformational model.More specifically, in the design phase, the application is modeled as platform-independent on the abstract mobile device. In the execution phase, the application is automatically tailored to the specific platform on the basis of the content and context adaptation mechanisms. We describe the analysis, design and implementation of a framework, called MODIF, which supports the proposed methodology, and show its application to the development of both business and consumer real-world applications on Apple iPhone? and Google Android? mobile devices. Finally, we discuss how the experience of using MODIF highlights the quality of the methodology in terms of automation of the lifecycle, expressiveness and readability of the representation, efficiency of the compilation/interpretation, fast learning curve and predictability.     

An approach to usability evaluation of e-learning applications

Despite recent advances of electronic technologies in e-learning, a consolidated evaluation methodology for e-learning applications is not available. The evaluation of educational software must consider its usability and more in general its accessibility, as well as its didactic effectiveness. This work is a first step towards the definition of a methodology for evaluating e-learning applications. Specific usability attributes capturing the peculiar features of these applications are identified. A preliminary user study involving a group of e-students, observed during their interaction with an e-learning application in a real situation, is reported. Then, the proposal is put forward to adapt to the e-learning domain a methodology for systematic usability evaluation, called SUE. Specifically, evaluation patterns are proposed that are able to drive the evaluators in the analysis of an e-learning application.     

A methodology for evaluating the usability of audiovisual consumer electronic products

Usability evaluation is now considered an essential procedure in consumer product development. Many studies have been conducted to develop various techniques and methods of usability evaluation hoping to help the evaluators choose appropriate methods. However, planning and conducting usability evaluation requires considerations of a number of factors surrounding the evaluation process including the product, user, activity, and environmental characteristics. In this perspective, this study suggested a new methodology of usability evaluation through a simple, structured framework. The framework was outlined by three major components: the interface features of a product as design variables, the evaluation context consisting of user, product, activity, and environment as context variables, and the usability measures as dependent variables. Based on this framework, this study established methods to specify the product interface features, to define evaluation context, and to measure usability. The effectiveness of this methodology was demonstrated through case studies in which the usability of audiovisual products was evaluated by using the methods developed in this study. This study is expected to help the usability practitioners in consumer electronics industry in various ways. Most directly, it supports the evaluators' plan and conduct usability evaluation sessions in a systematic and structured manner. In addition, it can be applied to other categories of consumer products (such as appliances, automobiles, communication devices, etc.) with minor modifications as necessary.     

Assessing the usability,accessibility, and mobile readiness of e-government websites: a case study in india

Universal Access in the Information Society - Government websites are intended to provide government services to every citizen of the country; therefore, these websites should be easily usable,...     

A unified approach to accessibility for a person in a wheelchair

Adapting the environment for a person with physical needs consists first and foremost to assess areas that may pose a problem of accessibility. Two problems arise: the person seated in a wheelchair must be able to approach an object and then grasp it. The placement of the mobility device has a significant influence on the grasping capabilities. We propose in this paper a unified method for evaluating the accessibility of objects in a domestic environment. The idea is to model the human articulated system and the mobility device and then to evaluate the existence of a global solution of the inverse kinematics. We propose to use our methodology to label a complete environment by checking at each point, whether it is accessible or not to a person, whose joint constraints are known, for moving in an indoor environment with obstacles.     

A usability study of iPhone built-in applications

The intuitiveness of gestural devices offers great potential for more physical ways of interacting, but it is imperative that such devices comply with existing, platform-independent usability principles that have proven their effect in heterogeneous settings over the last decades. This study focuses on iPhone, one of the most widely used haptic devices and reviews the usability problems of five built-in iPhone applications documented in related sources. The study investigates whether these problems are actually reported during testing with novice users, which is their severity and whether testing reveals additional issues. Overall, the study confirmed the list of usability problems documented and stressed the importance of conforming to established usability principles.     

A unified framework for market segmentation and its applications

Market segmentation is a core marketing concept that is conceptually simple to define and understand, but inherently a multi-criteria problem that is hard to measure and computationally difficult in many aspects. This paper reviews the development of market segmentation techniques and identifies the computational issues of the applications of market segmentation. A multidimensional unified framework for market segmentation is proposed based on the relationship among segmentation variables, data measures, and the multi-objective optimization techniques implemented. We conduct an empirical comparison of two prominent methods: a concomitant finite mixture model and a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. The result shows that the proposed framework helps to understand different segmentation models and solutions and to guide the development of new market segmentation solution techniques.     

A design methodology for data-parallel applications

A methodology for the design and development of data-parallel applications and components is presented. Data-parallelism is a well understood form of parallel computation, yet developing simple applications can involve substantial efforts to express the problem in low level notations. We describe a process of software development for data-parallel applications starting from high level specifications, generating repeated refinements of designs to match different architectural models and performance constraints, enabling a development activity with cost benefit analysis. Primary issues are algorithm choice, correctness, and efficiency, followed by data decomposition, load balancing, and message passing coordination. Development of a data-parallel multitarget tracking application is used as a case study, showing the progression from high to low level refinements. We conclude by describing tool support for the process     

Performance evaluation of unified memory and dynamic parallelism for selected parallel CUDA applications

The aim of this paper is to evaluate performance of new CUDA mechanisms—unified memory and dynamic parallelism for real parallel applications compared to standard CUDA API versions. In order to gain insight into performance of these mechanisms, we decided to implement three applications with control and data flow typical of SPMD, geometric SPMD and divide-and-conquer schemes, which were then used for tests and experiments. Specifically, tested applications include verification of Goldbach’s conjecture, 2D heat transfer simulation and adaptive numerical integration. We experimented with various ways of how dynamic parallelism can be deployed into an existing implementation and be optimized further. Subsequently, we compared the best dynamic parallelism and unified memory versions to respective standard API counterparts. It was shown that usage of dynamic parallelism resulted in improvement in performance for heat simulation, better than static but worse than an iterative version for numerical integration and finally worse results for Golbach’s conjecture verification. In most cases, unified memory results in decrease in performance. On the other hand, both mechanisms can contribute to simpler and more readable codes. For dynamic parallelism, it applies to algorithms in which it can be naturally applied. Unified memory generally makes it easier for a programmer to enter the CUDA programming paradigm as it resembles the traditional memory allocation/usage pattern.     

Automatic support for usability evaluation

The main goal of the work is to propose a method to evaluate user interfaces using task models and logs generated from a user test of an application. The method can be incorporated into an automatic tool which gives the designer information useful to evaluate and improve the user interface. These results include an analysis of the tasks which have been accomplished, those which failed and those never tried, user errors and their type, time related information, task patterns among the accomplished tasks, and the available tasks from the current state of the user session. This information is also useful to an evaluator checking whether the specified usability goals have been accomplished     

Countering design exclusion: bridging the gap between usability and accessibility

It is known that many people are being excluded unnecessarily from using products, services and environments that are essential for supporting independence and quality of life. Such exclusion often arises from designers taking inadequate account of the end users functional capabilities when making design decisions. This paper addresses how traditional usability techniques can be extended to include accessibility issues by considering the spread of user functional capabilities across the population. A series of measures for evaluating the level of design exclusion based on those capabilities is also presented.     

A unified methodology for the efficient computation of discrete orthogonal image moments

A novel methodology is proposed in this paper to accelerate the computation of discrete orthogonal image moments. The computation scheme is mainly based on a new image representation method, the image slice representation (ISR) method, according to which an image can be expressed as the outcome of an appropriate combination of several non-overlapped intensity slices. This image representation decomposes an image into a number of binary slices of the same size whose pixels come in two intensities, black or any other gray-level value. Therefore the image block representation can be effectively applied to describe the image in a more compact way. Once the image is partitioned into intensity blocks, the computation of the image moments can be accelerated, as the moments can be computed by using decoupled computation forms. The proposed algorithm constitutes a unified methodology that can be applied to any discrete moment family in the same way and produces similar promising results, as has been concluded through a detailed experimental investigation.     

A methodology for chair evaluation

A methodology for evaluating a single chair, rather than making a comparison among chairs, was developed from previous chair studies. The methodology was found to be rapid and effective when applied to a prototype chair, giving information to the manufacturer on overall comfort and good and bad points in the design. Testing took place on three tasks and showed that chair comfort is influenced by the task as well as the chair.