Usability Considerations Research Articles

Better access to information about clinical trials.

Access to information about clinical trials is important to researchers, health care professionals, and patients. Many have argued for the establishment of clinical trials registries, citing their substantial benefits. Although some registries do exist, it has been difficult to create comprehensive, easily accessible systems. This paper briefly reviews existing registries, discusses the challenges in building registries, and reviews some of their benefits. The paper concludes with a description of a new, extensive Web-based registry called ClinicalTrials.gov (http://clinicaltrials. gov/), which was developed at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by the National Library of Medicine as a result of recent legislation calling for a comprehensive, publicly accessible registry of clinical trials. The first version of the system became available in late February 2000 and contains information about approximately 5000 trials. The first release contains primarily NIH-sponsored trials, and new trials are regularly added to the system. Subsequent versions will contain information about trials sponsored by other federal agencies and by the private sector. The system was developed in accordance with basic informatics principles, including adherence to standards, usability considerations, and iterative testing and evaluation.

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.

IT outsourcing

Robert Pedlow and Anne Miller Introduction Review of Previous Research Case Study 1: Customer Support Platform Usability Team Involvement in the Outsourcing Process for the Desktop Communicator Project. Case Study 2: Human Factors Group Involvement in the Outsourcing Process for the ECommerce System Including Usability in the IT Procurement Process Usability Considerations for IT Systems Business Cases Usability Requirements for Requests for Proposals / Requests for Tenders Usability Specifications for IT Contracts Usability Considerations for Requirements Specifications Future Directions Directions for Research Influencing Business Decision Makers About the Authors Contact Acknowledgments References

Using Z to support the design of interactive safety-critical systems

Mathematically-based specification techniques are increasingly being recruited to support the development of safety-critical systems. Formal notations, such as Z and VDM, provide precise and concise means of representing a design without forcing commitment to implementation strategies during the early stages of development. Unfortunately, interface requirements are not normally considered within formal specifications. This threatens user-centred design. A prime objective in the use of formal methods is to minimise the modifications that are necessary once a specification has been refined towards implementation. Usability considerations therefore run the risk of being relegated to an afterthought in the development process. The paper argues that temporal and presentation issues must be represented within formal specifications of interactive systems.

Usability Considerations of Car Audio Equipment

Usability Considerations of Car Audio Equipment

Developing a food guidance system to implement the dietary guidelines

We developed a food guidance system to assist healthy Americans in making food choices for good health. The system differs from commonly used food guides in that it provides guidance for a total rather than a foundation diet. A framework of food groups—illustrated in the Food Wheel—is supplemented by additional information about food energy, total fat, fatty acids, sodium, sweeteners, and cholesterol. Goals for this system were based on the Dietary Guidelines, the 1980 Recommended Dietary Allowances, and usability considerations. These goals were restated as specific objectives based on a review of current concepts in nutrition science, recommendations by various scientific groups, and food consumption practices of the population. The first part of this article presents the rationale for the objectives and development of the food guidance system. The second part details the results of the research conducted to develop and evaluate the system. Expected levels of nutrients provided by diets selected according to system recommendations and expected levels of food energy, fat, fatty acids, cholesterol, sweeteners, and sodium are presented. The food guidance system provides the basis for the food guidance presented in the American Red Cross nutrition course, “Better Eating for Better Health”, and in “Dietary Guidelines and Your Diet”, a series of bulletins developed by USDA to help consumers use the Dietary Guidelines.

Improving system usability for business professionals

The architecture of the system discussed in this paper is based on sessions and objects. A way to extend the system is to add new objects. The challenge is to correctly identify the object the user wants to work with. Once this is done, the operations follow quite easily. At first, it is often obvious neither to the system designer nor to the user what the object really is. Another concern is to provide different versions of a session and object for different levels of user experience so that the user moves to more advanced sessions as he gains experience. This must be done while maintaining the display panel consistency and dynamic interaction consistency of the base system.

The DEMOS file system

This paper discusses the design of the file system for DEMOS, an operating system being developed for the CRAY-1 computer at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. The goals to be met, in particular the performance and usability considerations, are outlined. A description is given of the user interface and the general structure of the file system and the file system routines. A simple model of program behavior is used to demonstrate the effect of buffering data by the file system routines. A disk space allocation strategy is described which will take advantage of this buffering. The last section outlines how the performance mechanisms are integrated into the file system routines.