Thyra L. Rauch

Focus groups in HCI: wealth of information or waste of resources?

Many HCI professionals frown on focus groups, while some believe focus group methodology can be successfully applied to collect usability data. This panel features interaction among HCI professionals with very different experiences and opinions.

Usability management maturity, part 1 (abstract): self assessment—how do you stack up?

This SIG is a follow-up to the “Issues in Human Factors Organization and Practices” SIG held at CHI ’94. During that session, many people expressed interest in the assessment methodology used to evaluate the maturity of usability management in organizations. The intent of this SIG is to provide a forum for participants to assess their own organizations using structured evaluation methods similar to those that the SIG leader previously used in 53 organizational assessments. Participants in this SIG may also want to attend the follow-up SIG, “Usability Management Maturity Part 2, Usability Techniques: What can you do?” which explores techniques available for dealing with any weaknesses identified in the self-assessment.

Usability management maturity, part 2 (abstract): usability techniques—what can you do?

This session is a follow-up to both the Special Interest Group (SIG) “Usability Management Maturity, Part 1, Self Assessment How do you stack up?” held earlier today (an opportunity to self-assess the maturity of your organization’s usability activities), and to the “Issues in Human Factors Organization and Practices” SIG held at CHI ’94, at which interest was expressed in discussing ways to ascend the usability maturity scale. If you are from an organization with informal or no usability teams, then this is an opportunity to explore and discuss various tools and techniques (e.g. prototyping and user selection).

Information access: single source, multiple use

Web technology is a rapidly-growing arena. and we are seeking new ways to take advantage of what tie technology has to offer. In the development of our Web-based software product, we have applieci online help concepts to the design of our information. In addition, because this product is itself an online information solutiom we ‘ve addressed two types of single-sourcing implementing helps and documentation from a single source and making information available to a wide variety of platforms. Introduction New technologies are altering the ways we perceive information delivery and are affecting the audiences who use our software products. In the beginning of the computer age, user information was published in hardcopy. As onlhe helps developed, many products used at least two types of information from two different sources online helps and a hardcopy users guides. Now, with the ever increasing push to implement online documentation, it is possible to use the same source to provide both online helps and a users guide that audiences access via different access methods. Designing a SingI&Source Doc In this paper, we describe our experience using a single-source document to serve as a hardcopy book, online book, and integrated helps for a web-based electronic publishing product. We have been able to Permissionto copy without fee alt or pat of this material is grantedprovidedthat the copiesamnot madeor distributed for direct commercialadvantage,theACM copyxigbtnotice sndthe title of tie publication andits dateappear,andnotice is given thatcopying is by permissionof theAssociationfor Computing Machiuery.To copy otherwise,or to qublish, mquims a feeand/orspecificpermission. use the web to successfully implement this singlesource document. Audience Challenges We describe the audience challenges that we needed to overcome as we created web-based information for people accustomed to traditional online information associated with traditional software. We also describe some basic web design issues we considered as we developed the product. User Feedback We took user feedback into consideration every step along the way. Our paper highlights the design challenges we faced and the solutions we implemented for designing web-based single-source information that serves asonline helps and asa getting started book for a unique type of webbased software. We address audience adaptation issues that we encountered as we introduced users to our Web-based software product and accompanying helps and onhne information. These types of issues surfaced in both our beta tests and user sessions, which included prototype evaluations. We show how we refined our helps and information based on this data received fkom the Beta test and user sessions. Case Studies Finally, our paper focuses on the technical issues involved in single-sourcing information for hardcopy, the web, and other media. In case studies, we describe our own experience creating single-source information for our webbased software product to illustrate problems, solutions, and issues we encountered in the mma of implementing softsvare on the welx ● Distributing documents via the WWW ● Providing immediate accessto the latest version of documents ● Using across-platform, portable file format @ 1996 ACM 0-89-791-799-5/96/0213

Issues in human factors organization and practices

1.50

Method for automatically constructing contexts in a hypertext collection

DESCRIPTION Human factors activity within a product development group often starts as a grass-roots movement, when somebody cares about usability and usefulness. But caring is only a beginning; from that point on, the hard work never ends. We would ail like to reach a point where usability is an essentiat part of our products and all phases of the development process, where funding (within reason) is unquestioned, where user participation in design is the cultural norm.