Brian Still

Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives

The Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives is one of the few texts to combine OSS in public and private sector activities into a single reference source. This authoritative publication examines how the use of open source software (OSS) affects practices in society, business, government, education, and law. It provides a balance of theoretical perspectives, experiences, and cases in relation to these key areas. This thorough collection includes an overview of the culture from which OSS emerged and the development practices though which OSS is created and modified. The Handbook of Research on Open Source Software: Technological, Economic, and Social Perspectives is an international collaboration including authors from six continents and more than 12 countries. This multinational and multicultural perspective becomes crucial when making effective decisions about software in todays global policy and business environments. This text is an essential reference to business persons, policy makers, educators, and private citizens who are curious about how factors related to OSS may affect different aspects of their lives.

Usability of Complex Information Systems: Evaluation of User Interaction

Why do enterprise systems have complicated search pages, when Google has a single search box that works better? Why struggle with an expense reimbursement system that is not as easy as home accounting software? Although this seems like comparing apples to oranges, as information and communication technologies increasingly reach into every industry the demand for easy-to-use work tools continues to grow. An exploration of cutting-edge approaches for evaluating the usability of complex user interaction, Usability of Complex Information Systems: Evaluation of User Interaction focuses on improving design and communicating content to the end user. The book continues the conversation about the evolution of usability, asking how we can design and evaluate these complex systems and the complex work they support. It describes and analyzes approaches to teaching, testing, analyzing, or managing usability studiesapproaches that involve technical communicators making novel contributions to how we think about and evaluate increasingly complex systems. The book contains case studies on different types of complexity, including: A complex work environment, requiring collaboration among different people or a goal sustained over time, and often in the face of distractions, interruptions, and planned pauses A complex information context, one with no single answer, where the data changes dynamically or where the best answer may rely on other aspects of a fluid environment A complex technology, in which people use many different applications in their work and collaboration A complex topic, requiring advanced technical or domain knowledge Even systems that seem simple are, in fact, complex. The shopping interface for an e-commerce system may not be complex, but the databases, business processes, and logistics behind it certainly are. The examination of different aspects of designing and examining complexity presented in this book brings you a step further in developing a deeper understanding of what it takes to make complex systems work.

A Syntactic Approach to Readability

Focusing on the issue of readability, this article examines problems that readability formulas present to the technical communicator, especially in terms of interaction with government agencies, and focuses on readability formula requirements mandated by The Office of Health and Industry programs [OHIP] for medical technology product support literature. Because the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch-Kincaid formulas are widely available, they are probably the ones most frequently used. Contemporary readability scholars have overlooked the Golub Syntactic Density Formula, which evaluates prose according to a sentences syntax at a deeper level than the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per word. The authors recommend it as a tool for evaluating readability. How it might be applied with current computer applications is discussed.

Listening to Students: A Usability Evaluation of Instructor Commentary

Many students see instructor commentary as not constructive but prescriptive directions that must be followed so that their grade, not necessarily their writing, can be improved. Research offering heuristics for improving such commentary is available for guidance, but the methods employed to comment on writing still have not changed significantly, primarily because we lack sufficient understanding of how students use feedback. Usability evaluation is ideally equipped for assessing how students use commentary and how instructors might adapt their comments to make them more usable. This article reports on usability testing of commentary provided to students in an introductory technical writing course.

Editorial: Technical Communication and Usability Studies

This special section highlights the efforts of technical communicators to innovate new approaches for postmodern usability. Redish provides an invaluable historical overview of where we have been, and she also addresses where we might be headed as technical communicators engaged in shaping usability studies. Cooke presents a mixed-methods approach for data analysis, leaning on a mixture of eye tracking and concurrent think-aloud protocol. Finally, Kase, Zhang, Carroll, and Rosson offer a pattern-based approach as an alternative method for investigating sustainable strategies of information-technology learning.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Online Health Communication

Early scholarly inquiries into online health information focused primarily on questions of accuracy and credibility. In recent research, however, we are seeing an expansion in this initial focus, to include issues such as the usability, design, and ethics of online health information. This special issue contains five articles that contribute to scholarly inquiry in these emerging areas of interest.

Fundamentals of User-Centered Design: A Practical Approach

Fundamentals of user-centered design : a practical approach , Fundamentals of user-centered design : a practical approach , کتابخانه مرکزی دانشگاه علوم پزشکی تهران

Bodystorming with Hawkins’s block: Toward a new methodology for mobile media design

Inspired by the intuitive prototyping method employed by Palm Pilot founder Jeff Hawkins, this formative field study recreates and reimagines his generative techniques as a new methodology that could be useful for mobile media designers. Viewed theoretically through an activity theory lens, this approach also integrates bodystorming ideals as a way to externalize and embody user perspectives about the potential of place-based media, in situ, using a proposed National Park Service app, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, as an example. Such data gathering, especially early in the design process, could help user-centered projects gather otherwise inaccessible feedback, leading to better designs, through tailored content and interfaces, particularly at the dynamic intersections of digital and physical space.