JUS - UXPA International

Introduction – August 2013

With this issue, we start the eighth year of JUS. We thought it was time to look back over the first seven years to see if we are meeting the objectives that UXPA established for the journal. We examined the 77 papers that were published between November 2005 and February 2012. We looked at where the authors come from in terms of their geographical location and who employs them; the topics covered and the methods used, and how often the articles were cited in the literature. The analysis shows that the journal has met its primary goals but could have a broader impact with more papers focused on requirements gathering and design rather than its heavy emphasis on usability evaluation. …

Five Agile UX Myths

There are people who preach that Agile UX should be conducted this way or that, and they all have valid methods and legitimate approaches to creating usable designs in an Agile environment…

While most aspects of web accessibility are technically easy to solve, providing accessible equivalents of data visualizations for blind users remains a challenging problem. Previous attempts at accessible equivalents focused on sonification of population data. This paper describes the creation of two prototypes for providing real-time weather information in a sonified format for blind users.

Introduction

We are pleased to publish this special issue of the journal. As the guest editors explain in their introduction, the papers were first presented, in shortened form, at The Cambridge Workshop on Universal Access and Assistive Technology (CWUAAT) held in 2012. The papers focus on early stage development of new technologies to assist the disabled and include them in product designs. For user experience practitioners, this issue highlights the barriers the authors faced and overcame in collecting empirical data to assess the effectiveness of the technologies. It typically is a challenge in all empirical studies to recruit target users and set up a procedure to answer the relevant questions. As you will see, with technologies for the disabled there are …

User Experience Design: The Evolution of a Multi-Disciplinary Approach

An Early and Brief History of Software Engineering: The following sections present the history of software engineering in the 1960’s through the 1980’s.