Xristine Faulkner

When fingers do the talking: a study of text messaging

SMS or text messaging is an area of growth in the communications field. The studies described below consisted of a questionnaire and a diary study. The questionnaire was designed to examine texting activities in 565 users of the mobile phone. The diary study was carried out by 24 subjects over a period of 2 weeks. The findings suggest that text messaging is being used by a wide range of people for all kinds of activities and that for some people it is the preferred means of communication. These studies should prove interesting for those examining the use and impact of SMS.

Enter the usability engineer: integrating HCI and software engineering

This paper examines the role of Human Computer Interaction in the context of the Computer Science and Software Engineering curricula. We suggest there needs to be much more integration between Computer Science and HCI. We believe this can be brought about by adopting HCI as the underlying principle to the development of systems. Usability engineering would provide the necessary framework for the development of usable systems.

Brewsing the web: delay, determination and satisfaction

The major complaint that users appear to have about using the World Wide Web is that they have to wait far too long for information to download. At present, it is not possible to provide a sufficiently speedy service and therefore the problem of delay needs to be addressed in a different way. Delay is not simple matter of how much time has actually passed but how much time the user has perceived as having passed. In order to alleviate the problems of delay, the authors decided to examine the idea that feedback to the users might affect how long they were willing to wait and whether or not they were aware of the length of delay in delivering pages to them. With these ideas in mind, the authors developed four browser style interfaces offering various levels of user feedback and used these to evaluate user satisfaction with the systems.

Integration of usability issues within initial software development education. (It's all about the user dummy!)

Human Computer Systems (HCS) consist of machinery, software and people. However, all too many introductory software development courses concentrate unduly on the nature of programming and ignore the needs of the user. In this paper we will implicitly critique most existing introductory software development units, from an analysis of their supporting texts. We will suggest a checklist that could be applied to a unit or to a text to ensure that they include usability considerations. We will also critique many existing HCI units and courses that do not pay adequate attention to integrative exercises. We will conclude by suggesting ways in which these problems can start to be solved.