Maslina Abdul Aziz

Assessing the accessibility and usability of Malaysia Higher Education Website

The awareness of the importance of usability and accessibility in Malaysia is demonstrated with the setting-up of usability laboratories from local universities and agency and studies in different applications. This study share the interest on creating awareness of the importance of accessibility and usability criteria by investigating the accessibility and usability level of Malaysia Higher Education Website. This study used 120 samples of higher education institution websites from the online portal of the Ministry of Higher Education (http://www.mohe.gov.my). The accessibility evaluation was done by using automatic evaluation to access the accessibility level according to WCAG 1.0 guideline. Usability evaluation was also done on page size, speed and broken link. The study revealed several accessibility and usability issues revolving Malaysia Higher Education website. We end our study with few recommendations for further improvement of the website usability and accessibility towards better improved online services and information for normal and disabled user.

Investigating technology readiness of rural community: An analysis of age differences

In Malaysia, although the government has promoted technology inclusion of rural area, the consideration of readiness for technology is being neglected. Research effort on technology readiness in Malaysian rural area is low. This research argues that low technology readiness may worsen the disparity of e-inclusion in Malaysia. Hence, this research is performed to provide evidence of the extreme importance of the investigation of readiness to technology implementation before its inception. The aim of the study is to assess the readiness level in Malaysian rural areas according to different age groups. Kampung Tengah, Melaka, Malaysia was chosen as a case study, and a survey study design was adopted. Data from 150 respondents of four different age groups was gathered and being analyzed with Kruskal Wallis Test. The results display significant differences among different age for optimism, innovativeness and insecurity. The results have indicated that there is a need to increase the technology readiness based on different age group, and different age groups require different strategies for e-inclusion initiatives. Further work will be performed in this community to gather technological and ICT requirements to conceptualize the value chain and implementation strategy for the inception of technology. The value chain can be further integrated and enhanced with e-inclusion initiatives towards the implementation of ICT-based initiatives such as e-learning.

Investigating ergonomics awareness among university students

Human factors literature has stressed the importance of ergonomically good computer environment and computer usage as to avoid from ergonomic risk and illnesses. This paper aims to investigate the ergonomics awareness among university students. The data collected from the survey includes their prior knowledge about ergonomics, their current practice and their perception regarding ergonomic-related issues when using computer, as well as on ergonomic health risk. Questionnaires were distributed to 60 students. Result shows that there is a significant association between attending HCI course and having knowledge in ergonomics. Although these students know and understand the good principle of ergonomics, the results reveal that only half of them practice it. In terms of ergonomic awareness, the respondents are least concern on ergonomic risk of keyboard and mouse. The findings provide the current state of practice in computer usage environment. This finding indicates the need to educate students with ergonomic awareness.

Evaluating Construction Defect Mobile App Using Think Aloud

Construction Defect mobile app is used by Ministry of Defense’s Construction Defect Inspection Team to ease the team to record construction defect. However, the mobile app has never been evaluated formally to identify any usability problems. The objectives of this study are to identify usability problems of Construction Defect mobile app using Think Aloud and to recommend design improvement of Construction Defect mobile app based on the identified usability problem. The Think Aloud study involve with 15 participants. During the evaluation, every participant carries out the given tasks on and he gives his impressions as he goes along the tasks. There are three usability problems were identified. Some recommendations have been proposed to improve the design of Construction Defect mobile app based on the identified usability problem. As for the future work, the study may be conducted using different usability evaluation technique.

The Development of E-Research Engine System for Final Year Project (FYP)

Selecting a topic is possibly the most difficult part of final year project (FYP). The FYP must be completed by final year students with the aim to train the students to do their work independently while being monitored closely by their supervisors. Usually, the FYP topics chosen can either be from the students or new topic suggested by the supervisor in any computing area. There are some cases where the topics are not suitable for the students and vice versa. Based on this problem, we proposed a recommender system that will help to ease this process. The main objective of this study is to develop E-Research Engine System that could help to match between student and supervisor for the FYP project. A survey was conducted with 50 students from Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences (FSKM), Universiti Teknologi MARA. Results show that the majority of students used a search engine to find their research topic, and most of the students expressed their difficulties to find a suitable research topic that matches with the supervisor’s area of interest. In summary, the proposed E-Research Engine System will help students to save time and effort in finding the best match supervisor with a good quality final year research project topic.

Understanding the Atmospheric Cues Effects on Consumer Emotions: A Case Study on Lazada Malaysia

The effectiveness of atmospheric cues on consumer’s emotion has a significant impact on online businesses. The usability issues with regards to atmospheric cues especially while browsing electronic commerce (e-commerce) websites are very important. This paper aims to identify the common atmospheric cues, usability issues and their effects on consumer emotions while browsing e-commerce websites. Usability testing techniques was conducted to five (5) participants from different backgrounds by using qualitative methods. The outcome of this preliminary study will help e-commerce websites specifically Lazada Malaysia to reduce usability gap of online shopping experience. The result highlights the atmospheric cues and their influence on the website. These initial findings motivated the current study, which extends our previous work by proposing other key variables and several new recommendations for improvement to generate more effective usability issues.

A comparative study on low noise precision difet operational amplifier and low noise operational amplifier for potentiometric transduction circuit

This paper presents a comparative study on low noise precision difet operational amplifier, OPA111 and low noise operational amplifier, OP27 for potentiometric transduction circuit. Methods for integration of piezoresistive MEMS sensor with the potentiometric transduction circuit have reported successes. There was a need for a low noise operational amplifier for amplifying the output from the piezoresistive MEMS sensor since noise is the main problem in the circuit design. The purpose of this project is to reduce the noise effect by comparing two types of operational amplifier. The purpose of the design involved the piezoresistive MEMS sensing with the potentiometric transduction circuit. Since the sensor input range of 1.1 to 1.3 kilo ohms, the potentiometric transduction circuit designed enables the small changes in the resistivity. The circuit has been designed and test through theoretical, simulation and experimental studies. From the experiment, for the sensor input range, an output range of -0.108 to +0.1 volts is obtained. The percentages discrepancy within 4.278% for low noise precision difet operational amplifier, OPA111 and 8.308% low noise operational amplifier, OP27 is found between theoretical and hardware results, on the average. The null bridge condition is designed at 1.2 kilo ohms with the discrepancy of 5.71% is detected.

Development of Microcontroller Based Potentiometric Indicator System for Piezoresistive MEMS Sensor

This paper presents the development of microcontroller based potentiometric indicator system for integration with piezoresistive MEMS sensor. The purpose system involved the integration between hardware and software subsystem. For hardware subsystem, the design of potentiometric circuit was tested using P-spice software and breadboard circuit. Then, the design was fabricated for printed circuit board. This finding was then used to develop interface for the analog-to-digital converter. For software subsystem, the stress level indicator system has been developed using PIC 16F873 by converting the output from potentiometric circuit into stress level with a look-up table based on fuzzy rule sets for measuring human stress. It computes the digital data conversion into desired reading and displays data through the second hardware subsystem which is liquid crystal display. From the experiment, a potentiometric indicator circuit designed for piezoresistive MEMS sensor for human stress was successfully developed.

Synthetic Experiment in Evaluating the Usability Factor of the Requirement Change Propagation Process Model

The proposed requirement change propagation ( ReChaP ) approach promotes significant supports in simplifying the tedious tasks of requirement change propagation to other software artefacts during software evolution. One of the ReChaP’s pillars is the process model, which provides systematic guidelines to simplify the phenomenally time consuming and expensive efforts of the requirement change propagation process. This paper specifically reports on the preliminary results and the observation analysis for the conducted synthetic experiment in academic settings. The experiment’s goal is to evaluate the usability quality factor of the process model in terms of five main criteria; efficiency, effectiveness, learnability, satisfaction and usefulness. Our initial findings observe that the proposed ReChaP process model is soundly demonstrated as sufficiently usable, practical enough, and meantime has ideally achieved reasonable percentages for the five comprehensive criteria of the measured usability factor.