Néstor J. Rodríguez

Guidelines for designing usable World Wide Web pages

The proliferation of World Wide Web pages with poor usability is a serious problem because these pages waste user time, discourage exploration and could be responsible for a large amount of unnecessary traffic on the Internet. To alleviate this problem, we are proposing a set of simple guidelines for designing usable Web pages. The guidelines were compiled from a heuristic evaluation of existing Web sites. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the usability of home pages designed with the proposed guidelines. The experiment demonstrated that designers of Web pages can improve the usability of home pages by applying these guidelines.

PDA vs. laptop: a comparison of two versions of a nursing documentation application

A great deal of nursing documentation involves data collection at the point of care. In most inpatient settings this activity is carried out by nurses using paper forms or simply by memorizing the information and documenting it later on the patients record. These methods for collecting data at point of care delay the update of the patient record and may result in loss of information. PDA (personal digital assistant) technology can help overcome these problems. Their small size and their wireless connection capability make them a viable alternative for collecting and entering patients data at the point of care. In this paper we describe a usability study in which we compared two versions (PDA and laptop) of a nursing documentation application in terms of the efficiency and satisfaction achieved by nurses while conducting typical tasks. The results of the study indicate that it take nurses significantly less time to look for vital signs measurements, acknowledge a pending medication order, enter I/O measurements and enter a daily assessment on a PDA than on a Laptop. However, it takes them significantly less time to read a paragraph, enter a set of vital sign measurements and write a note on a laptop than on a PDA. The results also indicate that with the exception of writing notes, the overall user satisfaction is very similar for the both systems.

A usability study of physicians' interaction with PDA and laptop applications to access an electronic patient record system

PDA (personal digital assistant) technology is beginning to emerge as a viable technology for accessing and updating patient records. A handful of studies can be found in the literature on the use of PDAs for accessing patients records. However, none have actually presented a formal usability study of user interaction with these systems. In this paper we describe a usability study in which we compared two versions (PDA and laptop) of an application to access an electronic patient record system in terms of the efficiency and satisfaction achieved by physicians while conducting typical tasks. The results of the study revealed that physicians are significantly faster on a laptop than on a PDA reading and performing tasks that require text entry. However, they are significantly faster on a PDA than on a laptop performing tasks that only require pointing and clicking. In general they are significantly more satisfied with the actions performed to complete typical tasks on the laptop than on the PDA.

An automatic resource scheduling system (ARSS)

The Automatic Resource and Scheduling System (ARSS) is a computer based tool to keep, benchmark, and use customers and resources information to improve the quality of services while improving the productivity of the resources used in a service granting organization. ARSS was originally conceived and is being developed for the Emergency Room of a local hospital. However, its principles can be extended and applied to other types of service granting organizations. The system will have a real time picture of the production system load, condition, and behavior. It will collect the data, calculate statistics, and maintain information about service goals, patients, resources and processes. ARSS can eventually become an expert system to aid health care professionals, and administrators. The results and data analyzed can help in decisions concerning patient care and resource management.

The Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Supporting Hispanics at Critical Transition Points

Hispanics have the highest growth rates among all groups in the U.S., yet they remain considerably underrepresented in computing careers and in the numbers who obtain advanced degrees. Hispanics constituted about 7% of undergraduate computer science and computer engineering graduates and 1% of doctoral graduates in 2007--2008. The small number of Hispanic faculty, combined with the lack of Hispanic role models and mentors, perpetuates a troublesome cycle of underrepresentation in STEM fields. In 2004, seven Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) formed the Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI) to consolidate their strengths, resources, and concerns with the aim of increasing the number of Hispanics who pursue and complete baccalaureate and advanced degrees in computing areas. To address barriers that hinder students from advancing, CAHSI defined a number of initiatives, based on programs that produced promising results at one or more institutions. These included the following: a CS-0 course that focuses on adoption of a three-unit pre-CS course that uses graphics and animation to engage and prepare students who have no prior experience in computing; a peer mentoring strategy that provides an active, collaborative learning experience for students while creating leadership roles for undergraduates; an undergraduate and graduate student research model that emphasizes the deliberate and intentional development of technical, team, and professional skills and knowledge required for research and cooperative work; and a mentoring framework for engaging undergraduates in experiences and activities that prepare them for graduate studies and onto the professoriate. CAHSI plays a critical role in evaluating, documenting, and disseminating effective practices that achieve its mission. This paper provides an overview of CAHSI initiatives and describes how each addresses causes of underrepresentation of Hispanics in computing. In addition, it describes the evaluation and assessment of the initiatives and presents the results that support CAHSI’s claim of their effectiveness.

A study of physicians' interaction with text-based and graphical-based electronic patient record systems

The interaction style used in electronic patient record (EPR) systems and its usability can have a significant impact on the acceptance, efficiency and satisfaction of its users. In this paper, we describe a study of physician interaction with a text-based EPR system and a graphical-based EPR system. The usability attributes of learnability, efficiency and satisfaction are evaluated on typical tasks, such as viewing a patients record, documenting and ordering. The results of the study revealed that a graphical-based interface can significantly reduce the time it takes physicians to complete typical tasks in comparison with a text-based interface. The results of the study also revealed that physicians can get more satisfaction from interacting with a graphical-based EPR system than with a text-based system.

Word processing in spanish using an english keyboard: a study of spelling errors

This article describes a study of spelling errors made by writers while typing in Spanish using an English keyboard. The most important contribution of this study is the identification of a profile of errors made by writers using a word processor and an English keyboard to write in Spanish. The study revealed that a large number of the errors are related with words that have a character such as a, e, i, o, u or n. Another important finding of the study was that a substantial number of errors (approximately one third) are not corrected and that backspace was used to correct approximately two thirds of all the words corrected. The study supports the conclusion that the lack of straightforward support for characters such as a, e, i, o, u or n in the Spanish language can cause a significant number of errors.

SAAS: automatic system for auto-supervision in an emergency room

The development of powerful and affordable information technologies has increased the interest for clinical computing systems in many hospitals. The latest trend in clinical computing are the Computer-Based Patient Record (CPR) systems. These systems help to improve the quality of health care and at the same time reduce administrative costs. We believe that there are many possibilities to improve these systems. In this paper we present the ongoing work on the development of an automatic system for auto-supervision known as SAAS (Sistema Automatico de Auto Supervision), that introduces improvements to current CPR systems. The approach used in SAAS is based on patient flow and load behavior, and on information about resources capacity and availability. It strives to improve the flow of patients moving through the system and the assignment of resources to serve them. SAAS will be able to provide status on each and all patients as well as the load condition of each resource used in the system. As the SAAS system gains experience it will be able to automatically schedule patients and resources and send warning messages to specific administrative resources. SAAS was originally conceived and is being developed for the Emergency Room (ER) of local hospitals.

An event/rule framework for specifying the behavior of distributed systems

Although a number of standards for developing distributed systems (DS) already exist (e.g., RPC, CORBA, DCE, DCOM, Java RMI, Jini), they still lack of abstractions, services and tools for specifying the behavior of a DS. The specification in these environments is limited to the interface, i.e., which are the attributes and methods of distributed objects. We believe that behavioral ions should be part of the specification of a DS. This paper presents ERF, an Event/Rule Framework that provides a set of ions for specifying the behavior of DS in terms of events and rules. Rules in ERF are used to specify how distributed objects react to event occurrences. ERF has an open architecture which can be integrated to support different environments like CORBA, RMI and Jini.

HCI education & research at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez

HCI at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) of the University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez (UPRM) has taken center stage in the Computer Engineering program in just three years. This growth has been reflected in the academic programs, research, facilities, faculty, and students. Our research and academic emphasis is on usability engineering and programming of user interfaces.