Design Solutions Guided by User Behavior

Tagging systems design is often neglected despite the fact that most system designers agree on the importance of tagging. They are viewed as part of a larger system which receives most of the attention. There is no agreed method when it comes to either analyzing existing tagging systems or designing new ones. There is a need to establish a well-structured design process that can be followed to create tagging systems with a purpose. This chapter uses practical inquiry methodology to generate a general framework that can be applied to analyze tagging systems and proceeds to suggest a design process that can be followed to create new tagging systems. Existing user behavior while tagging is the main guide for the methodology.

Freight Transport and Logistics Evaluation Using Entropy Technique Integrated to TOPSIS Algorithm

Freight transportation and logistics decisions such as modal choice decisions are strategically important for effective supply chain operation and economic benefits. The freight selection logistic is a multi-criteria multi-objective (MCMO) process, crucial for smooth sourcing of materials, cost-effective delivery of products to customers in the right time, at the right quantity. The study discusses the major transport logistics attributes and the order preference by similarity ideal solution (TOPSIS) algorithm as the preferred MCMO model to support comparative ranking among the alternative freights. The entropy weight coefficient method minimizes the subjectivity in the selection of weight of the attribute. This study integrates the entropy technique on TOPSIS platform to improve the freight selection decision. A numerical example illustrates the procedure of the proposed algorithm and ranks the choices among truck, rail, and several intermodal transport combinations (rail/truck and air/truck) in a transportation selection model.

A Mobile System for Managing Personal Finances Synchronously

Many Small Micro-Medium Enterprises (SMMEs) fail within their first year of operation in South Africa mainly because of the lack of proper financial management skills. To address this, a number of software applications have been developed. However, they fail to cater for the needs of SMME owners. In this Chapter, we intend to design and implement a software application to address some of these financial management challenges faced by SMMEs. To achieve this, a through literature review was conducted. Then we designed and implemented a new system with additional features missing from the existing applications. The main objectives of this new system, is to help SMME owners manage their finances from anywhere, have access to real time data and be easy to use. To implement the system, PHP and MySQL database was used. Usability testing was done to evaluate the effectiveness of the system. The system performed 20% better in keeping records as compared to the manual accounting system.

Usability Evaluation of E-Government Websites in Saudi Arabia by Cognitive Walkthrough

Government websites are the easy sources of getting access to the services offered by governmental organizations. These websites provide manifold benefits to their users i.e. efficiency of use, cost decline, effective communication between citizens and government, delivery of different service, transparency and time saving. However, users cannot get full benefit out of these services if the e-government websites are not interactive and user friendly. Keeping this view into consideration, study investigated the usability concerns of the e-government websites in Saudi Arabia. Cognitive walk-through is selected as the implication method to figure out usability related traits by the real users of the interfaces. Findings from the study showed that these websites are partially usable for the users, as they lack some of the major concerns of the usability. Evaluation results showed the clear picture of the usability features of the selected websites of Saudi Arabia both in positive and negative ways. Furthermore, recommendations are given to improve overall quality of these websites.

The State of Art in Website Usability Evaluation Methods

Measuring the usability of the website is a key metrics which all designers always tries to maximize. Compared to other software it is very difficult to estimate the website usability as each website has many objective and wide range of visitor with different learnability. The objective of this study is summarizing different approaches used to measure the usability of website. The current study includes the different approaches proposed in literature in last two decades. Approaches are classified in six broad categories and a comparison between them is done. Trends in web usability of evaluation approaches are understood in light of changing needs of website.

Web Caching System

It is generally observed throughout the world that in the last two decades, while the average speed of computers has almost doubled in a span of around eighteen months, the average speed of the network has doubled merely in a span of just eight months! In order to improve the performance, more and more researchers are focusing their research in the field of computers and its related technologies. World Wide Web (WWW) is one of the services provided by the Internet medium for sharing of information. As a result, millions of applications run on the Internet and cause increased network traffic and put a great demand on the available network infrastructure. With the increase in the number of Internet users, it is necessary to enhance the speed. This paper addresses the above issues and proposes a novel integrated approach by reviewing the works related to Web caching and Web pre-fetching.

User Interface Design in Isolation from Underlying Code and Environment

The success of any software application heavily depends on the success of its User Interface (UI) design. This is since users communicate with those applications through their UIs and they will build good or bad impressions based on how such UIs help them using the software. UI design evolves through the years to be more platform and even code independent. In addition, the design of an application user interface consumes a significant amount of time and resources. It is expected that not only the same UI design should be relatively easy to transfer from one platform to another, but even from one programming language release to another or even from one programming language to another. In this chapter, we conducted a thorough investigation to describe how UI design evolved through the years to be independent from the code, or any other environment element (e.g. operating system, browser, database, etc.).

Mitigating Ethno-Cultural Differences

Community engagement is necessary for the success and sustainability of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) projects. To ensure active participation of community, researchers need to understand and adhere to the local cultural norms and adapt in the lifestyle of people. These cultural norms are mainly unwritten and implicit in nature. Hence the researchers spend maximum time of their field visits in observing and developing understanding of the community's life. In our long-term partnership with the indigenous Penan community of Long Lamai in Malaysian Borneo, we co-developed written guidelines for researchers and visitors. The researchers demonstrated their interest in aligning research process to the community's cultural values, however norm internalisation and development of associated behaviour is still a challenging. The written guidelines are yet only one of the attempts to the practices of community researchers' engagement and we are refining our methodology to enhance the researchers' learning process.

A Proposed Framework Factors of the Acceptance of Recommender Systems in E Learning for Saudi Universities

There is still a gap of knowledge on the usage of recommender systems in Saudi universities and the wider issue of technological change in the universities of developing countries. Relatively, this lack of knowledge is an issue to universities seeking to meet students/instructors' expectations and requirements by offering consistently high perceived service standards of e-learning services in a rapidly changing technological environment. To address this issue, this paper seeks to explore the impact of the acceptance and adoption of recommender systems in e-leaning for Saudi universities and this will help to investigate the students/instructors experience according to the e-learning service quality. Thus, a proposed e-framework has been presented. Such framework describes the factors of acceptance (such as service quality, student/instructor experience, and Human Computer Interaction guidelines) should be considered in the e-learning system because it is viewed as a determinant of student/instructor/university satisfaction.

E-Government adoption in Nigeria and the Journey So Far

E-government is an emerging field of research that has generated considerable interest recently. This research examines contributions from e-government as a means of providing solutions to developmental challenges that have been linked to corruption and a lack of transparency. Although the government has embarked upon a number of e-government initiatives, Nigeria ranks low in the area of e-government provision to its citizens. Initial findings show that the focus of existing studies have been on the supply side with little research focusing on the demand side. Initial findings also indicate that the e-government initiatives that have been implemented have little to no effect on increasing transparency and decreasing corruption. A framework for the evaluation of current e-government provision with a view to combating corruption is proposed. This will incorporate the users' perspectives into further development of e-government initiatives. The resulting framework will be applied to verify the contributions of e-government towards resolving some of the challenges facing the populace.