Spiros Sirmakessis

Designing User Interfaces for the Elderly

Age-related impairments influence the way people use computer systems and devices. Research in the HCI and usability domains has offered guidelines and methods that guide the design and the evaluation of applications targeting the steadily growing aging population. This chapter presents the RADIO GUI emphasizing on the interaction and user interface guidelines that guided the design of the End-User GUI for controlling the robot via a multi-touch device. This part of the RADIO system has been evaluated by two usability experts using heuristic evaluation and a set of guidelines for elderly users using applications on multi-touch devices. In addition, the system was evaluated by users executing specific scenarios that were eye-tracked in order to examine recognizability and memorability of icons, as well as readability and understandability of textual content.

Measuring Personal Branding in Social Media: Towards an Influence Indication Score

The exploding use of social media sites has allowed everyday people to build their own online personal brand, exploiting the social web to promote their strengths and unique qualities. Such passionate individuals make great fits for certain roles in a company as well as in leadership positions. Moreover, for certain positions the ability of candidates to build a strong personal brand and attract a high number of followers is a robust success predictor. In this direction, we propose a new module for assessing candidates’ personal brand strength, based on their social web activity. This module is then integrated in a company-oriented e-recruitment system which automates the candidate pre-screening process and evaluated as part of a pilot scenario.

Usability and Aesthetics: The Case of Architectural Websites

Modern people create, communicate and share knowledge and information through the web, but the need for usable website design is taken for granted. The ever increasing user familiarity with the web has drastically reduced user tolerance to website functionality problems. On the other hand, a requirement steadily observed by usability specialists refers to an increasing preference for the aesthetically pleasing and not the merely functional. This study aims to investigate the relation between website usability and aesthetics using the case of architectural websites and their typical users who are design experts with demanding aesthetic requirements. The study confirms that there is a close connection between aesthetics and perceived usability both when these two requirements are satisfied and when they are not.

Investigating the Integration of Hand-Held Haptic Devices in Daily Work Activities: The Case of a Tennis Coaching Assistant on iPhone

This paper investigates the integration of hand-held haptic devices in daily work activities in the form of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smart phones that help professionals perform their tasks in a more effective way. Such devices provide significant advantages of high portability, availability and familiarity, since their users already use them as mobile phones. The aforementioned issues will be studied in the context of a Tennis Coaching Assistant, an application running on an iPhone that provides management and scheduling capabilities for tennis trainers and allows a comprehensive overview of the execution of on-court drills and coaching programs. The paper describes the usability evaluation methodology applied and documents the results focusing on interaction difficulties and practical obstacles reported by the users as well as suggestions for future versions of the application, which generally received quite positive feedback.

Secure interface for risk management services

The authors present the architecture and functionality of the secure interface of RIMS. RIMS (Risk Management Services) is a secure intranet environment that supports the operational services in critical situations in four civil protection organisations in Europe. It contributes to information exchange and collaboration between experts for prevention, alert and crisis management in hazard management situations.