Introduction

Welcome to the first issue of volume
2
of JUS!

 

There is one thing about usability professionals: we always
ponder, wonder, reflect, and introspect on the state of our own profession.
Arnie Lund in his invited essay “Post
Modern Usability
” suggests that while the usability profession
has adopted some post-modernistic principles such as focusing more on user
experience and less on the formalism, the profession needs to move on beyond
post-modernism to shape “a practice that is a synthesis of the understanding
of the user and context, and the growing understanding of the principles
of how people interact with the world”.

The first peer-reviewed article in this issue is appropriate
for the voting season the United States. Selker, Rozenwieg, and Pandolfo
present a “Methodology
for Testing Voting Systems
” that can be applied to any kind of
voting system. The approach promotes the use of actual voting sites with
real poll workers. Another important aspect that emerges from their work
is the need to train the poll workers who participate in the study to increase
experimental control and reduce extraneous variability.

We continue with what may become a tradition: publishing
studies of mobile usability. Koskinen, Repo, and Hyvönen in their “WAP
and Accountability: Shortcomings of the Mobile Internet as an Interactional
Problem
” propose a different approach in testing and accounting
for the known limits of WAP usability. They propose the theoretical construct
of Situated Action and ethno-methodological perspective to study and explain
usability aspects of WAP.

This issue includes another article related to mobile usability. Ryu and
Smith-Jackson present the “Reliability
and Validity of the Mobile Phone Usability Questionnaire (MPUQ)
”.
They describe the rigorous process of analyzing and validating the questionnaire
that can be used primarily for summative evaluations and comparisons, but
also for formative evaluations.

Finally, I would like to thank all associate editors and all the contributing
reviewers
for the excellent and professional reviews they offered in
the first year of JUS resulting in a high quality first volume of contemporary
usability studies.

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