Monthly Archives: February 2013
Wenger, Etienne C., Snyder, William M. (2000) Communities of practice: The Organizational Frontier, Harvard Business Review, January-February 2000, pp. 139-145
Communities of practice are defined as follows: “They’re groups of people informally bound together by shared expertise and passion for a joint enterprise”. People in these communities share their expertise and knowledge in free-flowing, creative ways that foster new approaches … Continue reading
Hendry, D.G. 2004, “Communication functions and the adaptation of design representations in interdisciplinary teams”, The 5th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques (DIS ’04)ACM, New York, USA, pp. 123.
Design representations are used in user centered design to direct the design process and communication functions to enlist interdisciplinary participation. Five functions of design representations are listed in the paper (based on selective literature review): conscripting coordinating framing persuading recording … Continue reading
van den Haak, M.J. and de Jong, M.D.T. (2005) Analyzing the interaction between facilitator and participants in two variants of the think-aloud method. Proceedings of the International Professional Communication Conference, 2005 (IPCC 2005). pp. 323- 327.
DOI= 10.1109/IPCC.2005.1494192 Van den Haak and de Jong (2005) compared the interaction between the test moderator and test user in two different settings: using thinking-aloud method alone and paired user testing that they call constructive interaction test. They analysed parts … Continue reading
Schulte-Mecklenbeck, M. and Huber, O. (2003) Information search in the laboratory and on the Web: With or without an experimenter. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 227-235.
DOI= 10.3758/BF03202545 The studies of Schulte-Mecklenbeck and Huber focused on the effect of the location of test comparing laboratory settings and uncontrolled settings in locations selected by the users. The users were asked to do risky decision making, and find … Continue reading
Reeves, B. and Nass, C. (1996) The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. Chicago, IL, US: Center for the Study of Language and Information; New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press, 305 p.
Reeves and Nass (1996) made experiments to study if people are polite to computers in the same was as they are polite to humans interviewers, i.e., if they give more positive answers when a computer asks questions about itself than … Continue reading
Sauro, J. and Lewis, J.R. (2009) Correlations among prototypical usability metrics: evidence for the construct of usability. In Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI ’09). ACM, New York, USA, pp. 1609-1618.
DOI= 10.1145/1518701.1518947 To study the correlations between common usability metrics used in typical usability tests, Sauro and Lewis made an analysis focusing on summative usability studies made in practice. They were able to collect data from 90 usability tests in … Continue reading
Nielsen, J. (1993) Usability Engineering. Academic Press, Boston, USA. 358 p.
Although Nielsen’s book is now 20 years old, it still is a good reference on things like how to make a heuristic evaluation, how can usability be measured and what sort of ethical considerations are involved in having real users … Continue reading
Kjeldskov, J., Skov, M.B. and Stage, J. (2005) Does time heal? A longitudinal study of usability. In Proceedings of the 17th Australia conference on Computer-Human Interaction: Citizens Online: Considerations for Today and the Future (OZCHI ’05). Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group (CHISIG) of Australia, Narrabundah, Australia, Australia, pp. 1-10
Kjeldskov, Skov and Stage approached the question of differences between novice and expert users as test participants in a new way. Instead of having different users representing either novice or expert users, they had the same seven users as test … Continue reading
Hornbaek, K. and Law, E.L-C. (2007) Meta-analysis of correlations among usability measures. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 617-626.
DOI= 10.1145/1240624.1240722 Hornaek and Law repeated a similar meta-analysis as Nielsen and Levy (1994) on usability studies reported in top HCI conferences and journals. They studied the data from 73 usability studies and analysed correlations between various usability measures, such … Continue reading
Raita, E. and Oulasvirta, A. (2011) Too good to be bad: Favorable product expectations boost subjective usability ratings. Interacting with Computers, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 363-371.
DOI= 10.1016/j.intcom.2011.04.002 This article studies the effect of positive or negative priming on the subjective usability ratings after the test. The priming was done with two different versions of product review given to the users before starting with the test … Continue reading
Nielsen, J. and Levy, J. (1994) Measuring usability: Preference vs. performance. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 66-75.
DOI= 10.1145/175276.175282 Nielsen and Levy (1994) made a meta-analysis to study the correlation between test users’ performance with the compared products and their preferences after the test. They found a strong positive correlation between performance and preferences, but several cases … Continue reading
Mugge, R. and Schoormans, J.P.L. (2012) Product design and apparent usability. The influence of novelty in product appearance. Applied Ergonomics, Vol. 43, No. 6, pp. 1081-1088.
DOI= 10.1016/j.apergo.2012.03.009. Mugge and Schoormans studied the effects of novelty on the perceived usability. They used washing machines and cameras as test material, and varied the appearance of the products in the tests. For the washing machines, they merely changed … Continue reading
Tractinsky, N., Katz, A.S. and Ikar, D. (2000) What is beautiful is usable. Interacting with Computers, Vol. 13, No 2, pp. 127-145.
DOI= 10.1016/S0953-5438(00)00031-X Several studies have been made to assess the relationship between the beauty or aesthetics of a product and its perceived usability. The studies of Tractinsky et al. were among the first ones, and they inspired many others to … Continue reading
Hassenzahl, M. (2004) The Interplay of Beauty, Goodness, and Usability in Interactive Products. Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp. 319-349.
DOI: 10.1207/s15327051hci1904_2 Hassenzahl made studies in which he analysed the interaction between pragmatic attributes (i.e., perceived usability), hedonic attributes, goodness (i.e., satisfaction) and beauty. He used MP3-player software with two ugly and two beautiful skins in his studies, and used … Continue reading
Hartmann, J., Sutcliffe, A. and De Angeli, A. (2008) Towards a theory of user judgment of aesthetics and user interface quality. ACM Transactions on Computer‐Human Interaction, Vol. 15, No. 4, Article 15, pp. 15:1-15:30.
DOI=10.1145/1460355.1460357 Also this article contributes to the discussions on the interplay between aesthetics and perceived usability. Hartmann et al. used two versions of two web sites in their studies. A metaphor-based design was more aesthetic and also more engaging than … Continue reading
Tamar Ben-Bassat, Joachim Meyer and Noam Tractinsky (2006) Economic and subjectve measures of the perceived value of aesthetics and usability. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 210-234.
DOI=10.1145/1165734.1165737 The article by Ben-Bassat et al. continues the series of articles on assessing the effect of aesthetics to the perceived usability of systems. In their experiments, Ben-Bassat et al. added to the experiment conditions two methods that bring monetary … Continue reading
Boland and Tenkasi (1995) Perspective Making and Perspective Taking in Communities of Knowing, Organization Science, 6(4), pp.350-372
I read this paper because Karsten (2001) used the concepts from this article. Authors refer to communication that strengthens the unique knowledge of a community as perspective making, and communication that improves its ability to take the knowledge of others … Continue reading
Henderson (1991) Flexible Sketches and Inflexible Data Bases: Visual Communication, Conscription Devices, and Boundary Objects in Design Engineering, Science Technology Human Values, 16(4), pp.448-473
Visual representations, sketches and drawings, work as conscription devices, which enlist and organize group participation. They also work as boundary objects, which facilitate the reading of alternative meanings by people involved in the design process. Conscription devices are visually oriented … Continue reading
Karsten, H. et al. (2001) Crossing boundaries and conscripting participation: representing and integrating knowledge in a paper machinery project, European Journal of Information Systems, 10, pp.89-98
In this paper, the authors analyze how technical specification of a paper machine acted as a boundary object to help perspective taking. In addition, they analyse how the specification was used as a conscription device and how this enabled perspective … Continue reading
