Current Issue : July - September Volume : 2014 Issue Number : 3 Articles : 4 Articles
With themajor advances of the Internet throughout the past couple of years, websites have come to play a central role in themodern\nmarketing business program. However, simply owning a website is not enough for a business to prosper on the Web. Indeed, it is\nthe level of usability of a website that determines if a user stays or abandons it for another competing one. It is therefore crucial\nto understand the importance of usability on the web, and consequently the need for its evaluation. Nonetheless, there exist a\nnumber of obstacles preventing software organizations from successfully applying sound website usability evaluation strategies\nin practice. From this point of view automation of the latter is extremely beneficial, which not only assists designers in creating\nmore usable websites, but also enhances the Internet users� experience on the Web and increases their level of satisfaction. As a\nmeans of addressing this problem, an Intelligent Usability Evaluation (IUE) tool is proposed that automates the usability evaluation\nprocess by employing a Heuristic Evaluation technique in an intelligentmanner through the adoption of several research-based AI\nmethods. Experimental results show there exists a high correlation between the tool and human annotators when identifying the\nconsidered usability violations....
Public displays are becoming increasingly interactive and a broad range of interaction mechanisms can now be used to create\nmultiple forms of interaction. However, the lack of interaction abstractions forces each developer to create specific approaches for\ndealing with interaction, preventing users frombuilding consistent expectations on how to interact across different display systems.\nThere is a clear analogywith the early days of the graphical user interface,when a similar problem was addressed with the emergence\nof high-level interaction abstractions that provided consistent interaction experiences to users and shielded developers from lowlevel\ndetails. Thiswork takes a first step in that same direction by uncovering interaction abstractions thatmay lead to the emergence\nof interaction controls for applications in public displays. We identify a new set of interaction tasks focused on the specificities of\npublic displays; we characterise interaction controls that may enable those interaction tasks to be integrated into applications; we\ncreate a mapping between the high-level abstractions provided by the interaction tasks and the concrete interaction mechanisms\nthat can be implemented by those displays. Together, these contributions constitute a step towards the emergence of programming\ntoolkits with widgets that developers could incorporate into their public display applications....
We present a survey of pointing devices for wearable computers, which are body-mounted devices that users can access at any time.\r\nSince traditional pointing devices (i.e., mouse, touchpad, and trackpoint) were designed to be used on a steady and flat surface\r\nthey are inappropriate for wearable computers. Just as the advent of laptops resulted in the development of the touchpad and\r\ntrackpoint, the emergence of wearable computers is leading to the development of pointing devices designed for them. However,\r\nunlike laptops, since wearable computers are operated from different body positions under different environmental conditions\r\nfor different uses, researchers have developed a variety of innovative pointing devices for wearable computers characterized by\r\ntheir sensing mechanism, control mechanism, and form factor. We survey a representative set of pointing devices for wearable\r\ncomputers using an ââ?¬Å?adaptation of traditional devicesââ?¬Â versus ââ?¬Å?new devicesââ?¬Â dichotomy and study devices according to their control\r\nand sensing mechanisms and form factor. The objective of this paper is to showcase a variety of pointing devices developed for\r\nwearable computers and bring structure to the design space for wearable pointing devices. We conclude that a de facto pointing\r\ndevice for wearable computers, unlike laptops, is not likely to emerge....
Location-aware services may expose users to privacy risks as they usually attach user�s location to the generated contents. Different\nstudies have focused on privacy in location-aware services, but the results are often conflicting. Our hypothesis is that users are\nnot fully aware of the features of the location-aware scenario and this lack of knowledge affects the results. Hence, in this paper we\npresent a different approach: the analysis is conducted on two different groups of users (digital natives and digital immigrants) and is\ndivided into two steps: (i) understanding users� knowledge of a location-aware scenario and (ii) investigating users� opinion toward\nlocation-aware services after showing them an example of an effective location-aware service able to extract personal and sensitive\ninformation from contents publicly available in social media platforms. The analysis reveals that there is relation between users�\nknowledge and users� concerns toward privacy in location-aware services and also reveals that digital natives are more interested in\nthe location-aware scenario than digital immigrants. The analysis also discloses that users� concerns toward these services may be\nameliorated if these services ask for users� authorization and provide benefits to users. Other interesting findings allow us to draw\nguidelines that might be helpful in developing effective location-aware services....
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