Discount Usability Engineering Research Articles

Human-Centered Design Study: Enhancing the Usability of a Mobile Phone App in an Integrated Falls Risk Detection System for Use by Older Adult Users.

BackgroundDesign processes such as human-centered design (HCD), which involve the end user throughout the product development and testing process, can be crucial in ensuring that the product meets the needs and capabilities of the user, particularly in terms of safety and user experience. The structured and iterative nature of HCD can often conflict with the necessary rapid product development life-cycles associated with the competitive connected health industry.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to apply a structured HCD methodology to the development of a smartphone app that was to be used within a connected health fall risk detection system. Our methodology utilizes so called discount usability engineering techniques to minimize the burden on resources during development and maintain a rapid pace of development. This study will provide prospective designers a detailed description of the application of a HCD methodology.MethodsA 3-phase methodology was applied. In the first phase, a descriptive “use case” was developed by the system designers and analyzed by both expert stakeholders and end users. The use case described the use of the app and how various actors would interact with it and in what context. A working app prototype and a user manual were then developed based on this feedback and were subjected to a rigorous usability inspection. Further changes were made both to the interface and support documentation. The now advanced prototype was exposed to user testing by end users where further design recommendations were made.ResultsWith combined expert and end-user analysis of a comprehensive use case having originally identified 21 problems with the system interface, we have only seen and observed 3 of these problems in user testing, implying that 18 problems were eliminated between phase 1 and 3. Satisfactory ratings were obtained during validation testing by both experts and end users, and final testing by users shows the system requires low mental, physical, and temporal demands according to the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX).ConclusionsFrom our observation of older adults’ interactions with smartphone interfaces, there were some recurring themes. Clear and relevant feedback as the user attempts to complete a task is critical. Feedback should include pop-ups, sound tones, color or texture changes, or icon changes to indicate that a function has been completed successfully, such as for the connection sequence. For text feedback, clear and unambiguous language should be used so as not to create anxiety, particularly when it comes to saving data. Warning tones or symbols, such as caution symbols or shrill tones, should only be used if absolutely necessary. Our HCD methodology, designed and implemented based on the principles of the International Standard Organizaton (ISO) 9241-210 standard, produced a functional app interface within a short production cycle, which is now suitable for use by older adults in long term clinical trials.

Using a Discount Usability Engineering Approach to Assess Public Web-based Systems in Saudi Arabia

Using a Discount Usability Engineering Approach to Assess Public Web-based Systems in Saudi Arabia

REVIEWING THE SACARWEB DESIGN BASED IN DISCOUNT USABILITY ENGINEERING

This work analysed the SacarWeb's project and its objectives facing a usability analysis. The objective is to verify if the software attends its objetives of learnability, errors rate, if it is usable and to integrate usability techniques in the development cycle of the SacarWeb team. For this it was tested the Discount Usability Engineering approach, that proved to be adequate to teams with low usability knowledge, since it was found many valid usability problems and coincident among different evaluation types and evaluators. Our results have shown that is possible to a team make usability inspections based in the literature, that is possible to use the usability problems as a source of tasks to development team and that is not a difficult approach to learn, so it is possible to integrate in teams without usability specialists. Additionally we conclude that usability can't be neglected in the software development cycle, since many adoption problems can occur because of this kind of problem.

Heuristic evaluation quality score (HEQS)

Heuristic Evaluation is a discount usability engineering method involving three or more evaluators who evaluate the compliance of an interface based on a set of heuristics. Because the quality of t...

Extending the Usability of Heuristics for Design and Evaluation: Lead, Follow, and Get Out of the Way

User-centered design practitioners have often relied on discount usability engineering methods using heuristics. Top 10 lists of design and evaluation heuristics have proliferated during the 1990s, leading to a plethora of heterogeneous heuristic guidelines for a multitude of user interfaces. A simple, unified set of heuristics that might be applicable across different technologies, understood between disciplines, and equivalent to metrics used to measure ease of use can be beneficial. Lead, follow, and get out of the way (LF&G) theorizes that the optimal human-computer interaction (HCI) experience is analogous to a facilitative learning relation-Like a good teacher, mentor, or coach, the usable user interface leads the user to successful completion of tasks and goals; follows the user's progress and provides appropriate feedback and information when needed; and gets out of the way of the user to allow efficient and effective completion of tasks as the user attains mastery of the system, its concepts, and operations. A set of 18 heuristics grouped under the 3 general principles of the title are provided for use across the tasks of design guidance, development refinement, and end-user evaluation of computer systems. This article provides background into the development of LF&G, case studies on its use in real-world product design and development, and directions for further research needed to develop this approach into an empirically based method for defining, describing, designing, and predicting the ease of use of interactive human-computer systems.

Save on time, money and effort! Application of discount usability engineering to the design of internet-based learning environments

People in education are more and more interested in using the technologies of information and communication for providing educational content. In particular, the internet infrastructure can facilitate that task in many ways, such as distance learning or web-based learning. All such software artefacts, which we call internet-based learning environments, have as a common goal to offer "good" and "easy" products for learning. We think that discount usability engineering, a usability engineering approach, can provide some guidance for building such environments. In this paper, we describe the concepts and methods of usability engineering and in particular its discounted version. Then we promote the exploitation of discount usability engineering by presenting arguments to apply it to the construction and assessment of internet-based learning environments, with respect to educational goals, budget constraints, time schedule, and tight human resources availability. Finally, we close with an example where usability engineering is applied in an educational context.

SunWeb: user interface design for Sun Microsystem's internal Web

This paper presents the methods used to design the user interface and overall structure of the internal Web pages for Sun Microsystems. Sun has an extensive set of information available on the WWW with our home page as the access point, but we also wanted to provide employees access to internal information that could not be made available to the Internet at large. Much of the user interface work was done in a few weeks with four usability studies completed in a single week: card sorting to discover the users' view of the information space, an icon intuitiveness study, and two tests of the actual interface. The conclusions from this project are that a uniform user interface structure can make a Web significantly easier to use and that “discount usability engineering” can be employed to base the design on user studies even when project schedules are very tight.

Applying discount usability engineering

Usability engineering isn't just for the multimillion dollar companies with massive internal test labs. Jakob Nielsen, a distinguished engineer at SunSoft, relates how he and another designer (yes, a two-person project) employed low-cost, easily accessible techniques to perform several useful studies. The techniques, detailed in his recent book Usability Engineering (AP Professional, 1994), are virtually free of complex statistical methods, relying instead on simple observation and interpretation.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>