Idyawati Hussein

HCI practices in Malaysia: A reflection of ICT professionals' perspective

Although Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has been practised by Western countries over the last 40 years, very little is known about how HCI is being incorporated in Malaysian practices. We undertook a 12-week ethnographical study aimed at revealing HCI perceptions at different managerial levels in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) departments and agencies in Malaysia. We describe and discuss the factors that either drive or impede technology managers towards HCI awareness, based on the nature of ICT-related/software development in Malaysia. The result of the study indicates that the developers and corporations overall perception of HCI is influenced by their national and organizational culture. The lack of emphasis on usable interface design and scarce information regarding user studies and evaluation are major concerns. Within this context of developing countries, the difficulty of creating HCI awareness and adopting usability may be due to the complexity of the governments bureaucracy systems. We suggest that stakeholders and policy makers such as the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) and the Malaysian Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) are more relevant in influencing and/or reinforcing the incorporation of HCI in the workplace and enhancing the usability of the products and software created in the organization at the managerial level.

Usability in Malaysia

Malaysia is located in Southeast Asia and comprises 13 states and three federal territories. Malaysia has a population of about 28.3 million people (Department of Statistics Malaysia 2009). According to the Department of Statistics, Malaysia, for the year 2009, Malaysia’s gross domestic product (GDP) and gross national income per capita are USD 42.9 billion and USD 7,400 respectively. The latest unemployment rate is 3.6% (Department of Statistics Malaysia 2009).

A survey of user experience practice: A point of meet between academic and industry

This paper reports a questionnaire survey which is conducted at the iUser Conference in 2011. The iUser 2011 conference is expected to be the platform to discover the usability and user experience design practitioners from both academic and industry settings in Malaysia. A survey is adopted from the literature that attempted to assess the practice of user-centered design among Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) practitioners. The results reveal a contrary findings to the characteristics of attendees of HCI-focused conference in other countries. While the practice of user experience has gained more attention, usability issues is still at its infancy. The attendees were new to the terminologies and still learning on the fundamental of usability and user experience. The results show that the conference participants were unable to represent the HCI practitioners in the local settings. Consequently, in order to study the practice of user experience, researchers need to locate the right HCI practitioners who qualified to be classified as the community of practice who shared the same values towards embedding the user experience techniques in the existing technology development process.

Netnography Approach for UX Research

This paper discusses on how netnography can be applied to gain an understanding on sensitive research topic in a high power distance culture. The study investigated the frustrations among practitioners in incorporating the User Experience Design (UXD) in software development process. Netnography has been applied to uncover the unspoken behaviors of stakeholders and attitudes of clients who disrespect designers that reflects the UX practitioners frustration on the stakeholiders politics. This findings will be useful in seeking a solution to improve the UXD process. From this work it can be concluded that netnography can be a suitable approach to gain deeper insights into understanding practitioners frustrations in UX research study.

HCI Knowledge for UX Practices in the Web Development Process

Web development must consider good design in order to satisfy user interaction. However, for many users, the interfaces of Web applications are still difficult and frustrating to use. Frustration may not only result in personal dissatisfaction and inefficient use, but may also have a bad effect in the workplace. One experience with misleading data or unexpected results will undermine a persons willingness to use an application for a long time. Knowledge of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) supports developers in designing useful, usable and pleasant computing technologies. However, regardless of this knowledge, practice of the waterfall approach is the main methodology, embedded and integrated in well-established procedures. This study reports the results of a survey of 82 individual practitioners who received a formal HCI and HCI-related education in their Web development projects. The study used a Likert-scale metric to measure the prevailing User Experience (UX) in explicit practice which is rooted in the HCI-related discipline. The findings indicate that enforcement of the use of HCI knowledge can strengthen the policy of integrating UX principles in the Web development process by the appropriate authority, e.g. university department for project assignment.

Why Thinking Aloud Matters for Usability Evaluation

Computer applications should be enjoyable to use, do useful things and enhance the lives of people who use them. In the days of the web, issues of usability are critical to computer application such as e-commerce. Usability is re-defined as trade-off between increasing the user’s motivation to encourage exploration and purchasing in e-commerce, and the costs of usability errors [21]. This study reports on methodology applying expert-based and think-aloud methods in the laboratory setting. Usability evaluation of two airlines websites was carried out to study user performance and to investigate the websites’ conformance with ISO standards. Subjects comprised actual users who had experience using the online booking applications. Despite having results indicated that usability evaluation not only reliable in rating a computer application that is enjoyable and usable; it discovered design elements that manipulate users to make mistakes.

Why automation needs error avoidance guidelines and evaluation

why do we need automation? Many technologies cite three major reasons: to eliminate the dull, the dangerous, and the dirty routines. It is difficult to argue with this answer, but many things are automated for other reasons — to simplify a complex task, to reduce the work force, to entertain — or simply because it can be done [18]. However, none of the above matters relate to the findings of this paper, whereby automation leads to humans making mistakes.

Citizen experience towards humanizing digital government: a case in Malaysia

This paper identifies citizens experience in an ideation session for government online services. A purposeful sampling is applied to find subjects willing to participate on a particular date and able to explain their experiences in this domain in a reflective manner. This platform provides potential creative solutions to the problems. A sprint design method is adopted in order to produce an impactful outcome to the participatory approach.

HCI Practice at MIMOS Berhad: A Symbiotic Collaboration between Academia and Industry

In this paper, we share and reflect the current HCI practices between MIMOS Berhad and the academia, as an example of how industries such as MIMOS Berhad, can create, sustain and prolong the symbiotic collaboration between the two. We categorise the cooperation into two types: loosely and tightly couple cooperation.

Development of islamic websites evaluation guidelines

This study explored user perceptions of the Islamic Website Evaluation Guidelines (IWEG). It identified ten latent factors from exploratory factor analysis using orthogonal rotation method. The ten latent factors of the IWEG extracted indicated satisfactory reliability scores. A survey of 450 university students was conducted. All the respondents self-reported to have had experience using Islamic websites. The 84 features that were explored were classified under the ten latent factors extracted. Each of the 84 extracted items loaded cleanly on its factor between the range of .411 and .841 with no cross-loadings on other factors. Overall, three dimensions were formulated to better represent the ten latent factors: Content (objectivity, reliability, credibility, format), Islamic (identity, services, ethical values, symbols), and Impact (website use, positive impact). The overall analyses of the results were discussed. The practical implications of the findings were highlighted.