Archives: JUS
Usability Evaluation of the Spatial OLAP Visualization and Analysis Tool (SOVAT)
Abstract Increasingly sophisticated technologies, such as On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Geospatial Information Systems (GIS), are being leveraged for conducting community health assessments (CHA). Little is known about the usability of OLAP and GIS interfaces with respect to CHA. We conducted an iterative usability evaluation of the Spatial OLAP Visualization and Analysis Tool (SOVAT), a software application that combines OLAP and GIS. A total of nine graduate students and six community health researchers were asked to think-aloud while completing five CHA questions using SOVAT. The sessions were analyzed after every three participants and changes to the interface were made based on the findings. Measures included elapsed time, answers provided, erroneous actions, and satisfaction. Traditional OLAP interface features were poorly understood …
Heuristic Evaluation Quality Score (HEQS): A Measure of Heuristic Evaluation Skills
Abstract 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 the evaluation is highly dependent on their skills, it is critical to measure these skills to ensure evaluations are of a certain standard. This study provides a framework to quantify heuristic evaluation skills. Quantification is based on the number of unique issues identified by the evaluators as well as the severity of each issue. Unique issues are categorized into eight user interface parameters and severity is categorized into three. A benchmark computed from the collated evaluations is used to compare skills across applications as well as within applications. The …
Reliability and Validity of the Mobile Phone Usability Questionnaire (MPUQ)
Abstract This study was a follow-up to determine the psychometric quality of the usability questionnaire items derived from a previous study (Ryu and Smith-Jackson, 2005), and to find a subset of items that represents a higher measure of reliability and validity. To evaluate the items, the questionnaire was administered to a representative sample involving approximately 300 participants. The findings revealed a six-factor structure, including (1) Ease of learning and use, (2) Assistance with operation and problem solving, (3) Emotional aspect and multimedia capabilities, (4) Commands and minimal memory load, (5) Efficiency and control, and (6) Typical tasks for mobile phones. The appropriate 72 items constituted the Mobile Phone Usability Questionnaire (MPUQ), which evaluates the usability of mobile phones for the …
WAP and Accountability: Shortcomings of the Mobile Internet as an Interactional Problem
Abstract Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is designed to allow access to the Internet on a mobile phone. Attempts to explain its limited success have focused on attitudinal and cognitive reasons for non-use, finding that although people recognize the benefits of WAP, issues like lack of content, privacy concerns, and reference group behavior account for non-use. Such explanations have also been incomplete in that they have not addressed problems related to actual use and interaction with the technology. Our article studies the use of WAP as situated action. We focus on how users make sense of WAP pages and how they disambiguate in situ the responses from the service, i.e., new pages and new menus. Our method of transcribing videos of …