BCI-Based User-Centered Design for Emotionally-Driven User Experience

In order to develop a complex interactive system, user-centered evaluation (UCE) is an essential component. The new interaction paradigms encourage exploring new variables for accounting the users’ experience in terms of their needs and preferences. This is especially important for Adaptable Virtual Environments (AVE). In this context, to obtain a more engaging overall user’s experience, a good designer should perform proper formative and summative usability tests based on the user’s emotional level, which become a UCE activity. Our methodology tries to overcome the weaknesses of traditional methods by employing a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) to collect additional information on user’s needs and preferences. A set of preliminary usability experiments has been conducted for (i) determining if the outcome of a BCI is suitable to drive the designer in organizing the user-system dialog within AVE and (ii) evaluating the user-system dialog, in terms of dynamic increase of the emotionally-driven interaction’s customization.

Developing the Intel® Pair & Share Experience

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

Integrating Semiotics Perception in Usability Testing to Improve Usability Evaluation

User interfaces of computer applications encompass a number of objects such as navigation links, buttons, icons, and thumbnails. In this chapter, these are called interface signs. The content and functions of a computer application are generally directed by interface signs to provide the system’s logic to the end users. The interface signs of a usable application need to be intuitive to end users and therefore a necessary part of usability evaluation. Assessing sign intuitiveness can be achieved through a semiotic analysis. This study demonstrates how a semiotic assessment of interface signs’ intuitiveness yielded a number of benefits. For instance, (i) it provides an overall idea of interface signs’ intuitiveness to the end users to interpret the meaning of interface signs, (ii) it assists in finding usability problems and also in (iii) recommending possible solutions, (iv) provides background for introducing guidelines to design user-intuitive interface signs, (v) helps in constructing heuristic checklist from semiotics perspective to evaluate an application, (vi) no additional resource and extra budget are needed. This study also presents a list of methodological guidelines to obtain the perceived benefits of integrating semiotic perception in usability testing for practitioners.

A Practitioner’s Approach to Collaborative Usability Testing

The purpose of this case study is to outline a methodology for collaborative usability testing developed in a local government setting where subject matter experts (SMEs), content owners, stakeholders, IT professionals and the public are engaged in the design and development of public sector websites.

Usability Optimization of a Military Training System

While the application of usability engineering principles and methods is similar in commercial and military contexts, there are key requirements and challenges in military domains that must be addressed. The aim of this chapter is to describe the application of a combination of usability engineering methods in the development of a military training system. The case involves the research, design, and development of an instructional support system to help instructors and warfighters find and execute suitable training lessons that meet their training needs. Through the application of multiple methods (contextual task analysis, iterative designs, heuristic evaluations, formative and summative evaluations), the requirements for the system were identified, the system was then designed, developed, and iteratively improved to optimize key operational performance identified with the support of field stakeholders.

Digital Heritage Systems

This chapter describes the evaluation methods conducted for a digital heritage system, called ARCO (Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects), which examines the tools and methods used for its evaluation. The case study describes the knowledge acquired from several user requirement assessments, and further describes how to use this specific knowledge to provide a general framework for a holistic virtual museum evaluation. This approach will facilitate designers to determine the flaws of virtual museum environments, fill the gap between the technologies they use and those the users prefer and improve them in order to provide interactive and engaging virtual museums. The proposed model used not only quantitative, but also qualitative evaluation methods, and it is based on the extensive evaluations of the ARCO system by simple end-users, usability experts and domain experts. The main evaluation criteria were usability, presence, and learning.

The Usability Evaluation of a Touch Screen in the Flight Deck

This chapter presents and discusses an Expert Usability Evaluation for a flight deck touch screen prototype, carried out in one European co-funded project called ALICIA (www.alicia-project.eu). Through the presentation of this evaluation activity and its impact on the rest of design process, this chapter will address some methodological issues on usability in complex domains: 1) The specific context in which the technology is introduced has to be well known by the designers as it provides crucial constraints to be taken into account; 2) Evaluating complex safety critical systems entails the use of a holistic multidisciplinary approach and an iterative design process that involve, in different phases, several type of experts (engineers, human factors, usability experts, end users and stakeholders); and 3) The level of maturity of the technology and the evaluation objectives contribute to the definition of the evaluation methods to be used.

A Usability Study of Mobile Text Based Social Applications

The authors present a usability study where three of the most popular mobile Social Applications (mobile Facebook, mobile Twitter, and mobile Windows Live) were analyzed. The evaluation focused on four text-based tasks: Text-lines visualized at one time (Number of Turns), contacts visualization, conversation tracing, and text entry. The evaluation was performed using an adapted version of the System Usability Scale (SUS), which was answered by ninety participants (each mobile Social Application was analyzed by thirty participants). The authors firmly believe that the results of the study could lead to create a reliable strategy for design evaluation which could be structured into a set of heuristics.

Social Negotiations in Web Usability Engineering

This study of a website development project for a university athletic club illustrates how negotiations between designers and users play a fundamental role in defining website usability. Whilst usability can be ‘objectively’ measured using formal scales (number of clicks required, user effort or error rate to achieve an aim etc.), it may also be subjectively defined as the extent to which a website serves its intended audience. Usability engineering is therefore a social process involving interactions between users and designers that determine what is appropriate for a given context. This case demonstrates the value of a ‘heterogeneous’ approach to website usability that involves engineering this context by negotiating the social alongside the technical. A strong stepwise website methodology that promotes early and continual user engagement – including sign-off of staged prototypes – is seen to be an important facilitating structure that carries these social negotiations forward through the web usability engineering lifecycle to successful project conclusion.

Pogo Chat

Pogo.com, an Electronic Arts (EA) casual gaming website, has over 150 games. The older, timeless games, around 610 horizontal pixels, are neighbored by an online group chat window which allows players to communicate during gameplay. Newer games do not have the same size constraints, some as wide as 760 horizontal pixels. These newer games originally lacked a chat window; however, the feedback from Pogo users was clear – they wanted the ability to chat. This paper will focus on the iterative usability testing utilized in determining if and how chat should be added into these new games on Pogo. The chat solutions as well as some challenges faced in reaching these solutions are discussed. While players wanted a chat window in all games, they did not want it to interfere with their game play. There was a preference for multiple chat solutions depending on the size of the game brick.