Ivica Mitrović

Usability evaluation of web portals

The paper reports on the experience concerning the design of a ldquodiscount evaluationrdquo of broad-reach Web portal usability. The methodology employs a range of assessment methods, providing a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation feedback. It advocates a number of usability test methods along with specialistspsila inspection. The results indicate that chosen research instruments, measures and methods for usability testing were consistent. Conversely, the results of the guideline inspection did not conform to the ones obtained through the user testing. Although showing respectable potential, it raised some concerns.

UrbanixD: designing human interactions in the networked city

Interaction Design, in an urban context, is an increasingly important field of research. City populations are currently in a state of rapid flux. Conurbations are fast becoming a hybrid of the physical environment and the digital datasphere. How we, as physical beings, will connect with, interpret and adapt this increasing dataflow residing in our cities is already becoming a significant research question. The SIG organisers will frame the discussion through a human-centred view of the concerns, experiences and behaviours that may occur in cities of the future. By adopting an approach of Thinking and Doing it is hoped that the SIG will act as a catalyst for community building.

The City in Cinema: How Popular Culture can Influence Research Agendas

Abstract This session at FET11 explored how the cinematic city could inspire researchers who are working on the transformative applications, concepts and infrastructures that will characterise the next decade. A series of film clips were shown under three broad categories: City as a System; Individual and the System; and Artefacts of the System. After each session a discussion took place among the participants and the emergent themes were recorded on notecards. These were photographed and displayed in a slideshow format for the remainder of the discussions. At the conclusion of the session it was agreed that the portrayal of future cities and the lives of their inhabitants in the cinema can reveal many enduring personal, societal and cultural concerns. These concerns must form the basis of requirements if technologies are to successfully integrate into our private and public lives.

Development of the evaluation form for expert inspections of web portals

Web portals are a special breed of web sites, providing a large and diverse user population with a blend of information, services and facilities. Due to the lack of heuristics for the design and evaluation of general portals, we have conducted an experimental work to create research instrument for expert inspections. A set of 36 equally-levelled guidelines was developed to measure the hypothetical usability categories which reflect the four most distinctive elements of the contemporary web design process. The Portal Guidelines for expert inspections prove valuable to both novice inspectors and HCI experts, but further research will be required to validate the findings of this study.

Towards a Cost-Effective Evaluation Approach for Web Portal Interfaces

A cost-effective approach for web portal usability evaluation is presented in this chapter. Due to specifics of portals as web sites, mainly referring to their structure and media specificities along with diversity of users, tasks and workflows, distinct assessment approaches should be employed. Methodology brings together laboratory-based testing along with experts’ inspection and produces valuable results for users and developers at a low cost. Compared to our first study, user assessment applied a faster and less expensive procedure, providing stability of measures with reduced sample size, while inspection employed fewer specialists with higher expertize and a simpler evaluation form. Directions of future work are identified.