Saila Ovaska

Usability evaluation involving participants with cognitive disabilities

People with cognitive disabilities benefit from new computerized tools for maintaining social contacts. Their need for easy-to-use applications has been established. However, there is little research on improving usability evaluation methods with this user group. We conducted a case study with a group of users with cognitive disabilities. Pilot test findings indicated that a think aloud test would not work well with this user group. Therefore, instead of a conventional usability test, we conducted an informal walkthrough, in addition to classroom observation and interviews. Our study shows a need to collect data with several complementary methods, and to adjust the methods to suit the characteristics of the participants. Without observational methods, many usability problems would have been missed. Furthermore, the special characteristics of this user group have to be taken into account also in expert evaluation.

Electronic whiteboard in kindergarten: opportunities and requirements

Whiteboards have proven valuable for informal note-taking and sketching. Different electronic and also interactive whiteboards are becoming available for children and their teachers at all school levels. We describe the first experiences of children at a day care centre when using an electronic whiteboard for creative letter recognition in small groups. Though the usability of the tool used in this task was not optimal for smooth drawing together, the constraints the tool posed for the childrens group work were also a motive for fruitful dialogue and new learning opportunities. Based on our observations of the groups, we outline opportunities as well as requirements for interactive whiteboards to empower childrens collaborative learning at the kindergarten level.

Towards a contingency approach with whitelist-and blacklist-based anti-phishing applications: what do usability tests indicate?

In web browsers, a variety of anti-phishing tools and technologies are available to assist users to identify phishing attempts and potentially harmful pages. Such anti-phishing tools and technologies provide Internet users with essential information, such as warnings of spoofed pages. To determine how well users are able to recognise and identify phishing web pages with anti-phishing tools, we designed and conducted usability tests for two types of phishing-detection applications: blacklist-based and whitelist-based anti-phishing toolbars. The research results mainly indicate no significant performance differences between the application types. We also observed that, in many web browsing cases, a significant amount of useful and practical information for users is absent, such as information explaining professional web page security certificates. Such certificates are crucial in ensuring user privacy and protection. We also found other deficiencies in web identities in web pages and web browsers that present challenges to the design of anti-phishing toolbars. These challenges will require more professional, illustrative, instructional, and reliable information for users to facilitate user verification of the authenticity of web pages and their content.

Designing spoken instructions with preschool children

The participation of children in the technology design process is often enabled by drawing, low-tech prototyping, and collecting their experiences with hands-on trials as a basis for new designs. We report on a well-defined design task with six-year-old children as design partners, where no concrete prototyping methods were available. The children were able to contribute to the design of instructions. We found that children had little problems designing with speech when the goal was well defined. However, the children had problems in building up on the ideas presented by others.

Faces of Privacy: Effect of Culture and Context

We repeated in Finland a study on privacy concerns originally carried out in the USA. The results suggest that there are cultural differences in the willingness of people to reveal privacy-sensitive information.

User Experience and Learning Experience in Online HCI Courses

Several Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become available also in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), in addition to other fields of study. How do they operate, and what do they teach? We compare two HCI MOOCs with a locally composed small scale online HCI course that was built and launched in 2012, and discuss issues in pedagogy, user experience and learner experience in online HCI education.

Initial observations on children and online instructions

When children use a computer, they often need instructions for how to proceed. However, giving instructions in the user interface is challenging: young children do not know how to read, or the instructions might be in a language they do not master. We describe three small scale usability studies where the amount and method of advice giving in the interface varied. Our results show that children manage to use properly designed software with no instructions at all. Some usability test protocols emphasize giving children spoken instructions to help them get started. In our case studies we report two kinds of adult presence in the group for providing the spoken instructions, and the mixed findings of the role of the adult.

Heuristics for motion-based control in games

Gesturing and motion control have become common as interaction methods for video games since the advent of the Nintendo Wii game console. Despite the growing number of motion-based control platforms for video games, no set of shared design heuristics for motion control across the platforms has been published. Our approach in this paper combines analysis of player experiences across platforms. We work towards a collection of design heuristics for motion-based control by studying game reviews in two motion-based control platforms, Xbox 360 Kinect and PlayStation 3 Move. In this paper we present an analysis of player problems within 256 game reviews, on which we ground a set of heuristics for motion-controlled games.

Teaching privacy with ubicomp scenarios in HCI classes

Privacy is a many-faceted concept and, consequently, designing for privacy is a challenging topic to teach. Privacy in ubicomp environments adds to the challenge, since such environments are still rare and people have not gained experience from interacting in them. Scenarios can be used to make the issues concrete for students. We describe three cases, with different scenarios, different pedagogical goals, different levels of students, and different data collection methods, for teaching about privacy using scenarios. We report on the experiences, both the successes and the pitfalls that need to be taken into account.

Parallel design in the classroom

In parallel design the main goal is to produce design ideas worth investigating further. We have used a design problem previously solved by three experts as the term assignment in our HCI class. We discuss the wealth of solutions produced by the students and their relationship to the expert solutions. Together, the students could come up with more interesting ideas than the experts. On the other hand, for choosing one solution for further development the expert solutions stood out.