Randolph G. Bias

Crowdsourcing for usability testing

While usability evaluation is critical to designing usable websites, traditional usability testing can be both expensive and time consuming. The advent of crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower offer an intriguing new avenue for performing remote usability testing with potentially many users, quick turn-around, and significant cost savings. To investigate the potential of such crowdsourced usability testing, we conducted a usability study which evaluated a graduate school’s website using a crowdsourcing platform. In addition, we performed a similar but not identical traditional lab usability test on the same site. While we find that crowdsourcing exhibits some notable limitations in comparison to the traditional lab environment, its applicability and value for usability testing is clearly evidenced. We discuss both methodological differences for crowdsourced usability testing, as well as empirical contrasts to results from more traditional, face-to-face usability testing.

Collection understanding

Collection understanding shifts the traditional focus of retrieval in large collections from locating specific artifacts to gaining a comprehensive view of the collection. Visualization tools are critical to the process of efficient collection understanding. By presenting simple visual interfaces and intuitive methods of interacting with a collection, users come to understand the essence of the collection by focusing on the artifacts. We discuss a practical approach for enhancing collection understanding in image collections.

22 Chapter – Cost-Justifying Usability: The View from the Other Side of the Table

Publisher Summary This chapter describes the experiences of usability professionals, with cost justifying usability efforts. Individually, they had experience considering proposals to fund or otherwise support usability projects. Collectively, their companies represented a broad expanse of the software or website landscape. The “users” of proposals for usability support are the executives who hold the purse strings and decide how to deploy resources. In this chapter, user-centered design approach is pursued to maximize the chances that the proposals for funding will be seen as usable (and, more to the point, will be funded). Three fundamental questions about usability support have been asked to different professionals, and their responses have been discussed. These are followed by three considerations that deal with starting up, attribution problem, and the “Compleat Angler” (for usability funding).

Usability Science. I: Foundations

In this article, we describe and analyze the emergence of a scientific discipline, usability science, which bridges basic research in cognition and perception and the design of usable technology. An analogy between usability science and medical science (which bridges basic biological science and medical practice) is discussed, with lessons drawn from the way in which medical practice translates practical problems into basic research and fosters technology transfer from research to technology. The similarities and differences of usability science to selected applied and basic research disciplines-human factors and human-computer interaction (HCI) is also described. The underlying philosophical differences between basic cognitive research and usability science are described as Wundtian structuralism versus Jamesian pragmatism. Finally, issues that usability science is likely to continue to address-presentation of information, user navigation, interaction, learning, and methods-are described with selective reviews of work in graph reading, controlled movement, and method development and validation.

Visual search and reading tasks using ClearType and regular displays: two experiments

Two experiments comparing user performance on ClearType and Regular displays are reported. In the first, 26 participants scanned a series of spreadsheets for target information. Speed of performance was significantly faster with ClearType. In the second experiment, 25 users read two articles for meaning. Reading speed was significantly faster for ClearType. In both experiments no differences in accuracy of performance or visual fatigue scores were observed. The data also reveal substantial individual differences in performance suggesting ClearType may not be universally beneficial to information workers.

Usability support inside and out

optimal organizational placement of human f&ztars professionals in software development organhations [l, 5, 6, 7, 8]--“optimal” in terms of maximizing the usabiity of the resultant products. Common considerations have included whether or not to “mainstream” the human factors professionals onto development teams [4], and, if maintaining a centmlized human factors department, whether or not to place that department in the direct reporting line to the product manager [2]. Given our recent, new experiences with “vertical teams” and with hybrid (centralized and mainstreamed) usabiity support, we would like to add to the corpus of thought on the optimal placement, and on the activities that are required to maintain the vital usabiity support in various organizational models. There are two basic models of how human factors (or any) sup port can be given to a sofiware (or any) development project.

Justifying Cost-Justifying Usability

Publisher Summary In the mid- to late 1990s the Internet came into being (or at least, became available to the masses), and the number and breadth of computer users grew exponentially. This chapter presents a short history of cost-justifying usability and a short list of why the Internet age offers an even stronger need to employ such an approach. There are basic HCI cost-benefit frameworks that apply to the Web as well as they do to traditional software development projects; however, there are some unique aspects of cost justifying usability for the Web as well. In the realm of HCI design, the most significant event was the advent of (or, perhaps more accurately, the wide availability of) the Internet. The breadth and lack of knowledge about the characteristics of new or anonymous site visitors, or Web-based application users, argues for new best practices in usability studies, new accepted levels of statistical confidence, and new vigilance as to the user profiles of potential visitors, actual visitors, and buyers. But whatever those practices, confidence levels, and profiles are, this breadth makes it all the more important to know the costs and benefits of employing usability engineering for the site or application, and the costs of not employing usability engineering. The point is that the presence of the Internet and the easy-to-use Internet site development tools means that more and more less-qualified people are serving as designers, thus making usability engineering even more necessary.

Remote usability testing: a practice

For increasingly frequent use of library resources by remote users, remote usability testing has become a valuable tool for those who would pursue an empirical, user-centered design of the interfaces to their electronic resources and services. This paper describes our implementation of remote usability tests to evaluate prototypes of a web content management application developed by Vignette Corporation, and reports sample results to illustrate the utility of such an approach that can help designing and improving interfaces of digital library projects and their usability.

Taking the “Task” Out of Task Analysis

Task analysis is a well-accepted component of user-centered design. It is often left out of the design process, however, due to a lack of practical methods, the difficulty in predicting the amount of resource required to perform it, and a short supply of people with the appropriate skills. A solution to these problems is a structured set of activities that compose a task analysis and relate to the overall design process. The general framework into which these activities fit has three phases: Data Collection, Data Analysis, and Design. During the Data Collection phase, user and task data are collected and validated. The Data Analysis phase requires analyzing the user and task data in a way that results in suggestions for information representation, navigation, terminology, and consistency. Finally, the Design phase requires translating the suggestions from the Data Analysis phase into a viable product. A prototype task analysis workbook was developed to assess the feasibility of the structured approach to task analysis. The workbook includes tools for data collection, data analysis, and design, as well as instructions for how to use the tools. Over a period of two years, the workbook was used in five different development projects. A representative from each group was interviewed to determine how the workbook was used and which parts were most useful. Results of the interviews indicate that the workbook approach has merit.

Sentence Comprehension Processes in the Pre-Schooler

Among the goals of developmental psycholinguistics are these three: to construct a description of the tacit knowledge of language that children have at various points in their development; to describe the processes that children use in producing and comprehending sentences; and to describe the principles of change or development that govern the first two. It is obvious that these are interdependent tasks.