Semiconductor manufacturing is complex. Companies strive to lead in the markets by delivering timely chips which are bug (a.k.a defect) free and have very low power consumption. The new research drives new features in chips. The case study research reported here is about the usability and productivity of the silicon debug software tools. Silicon debug software tools are a set of software used to find bugs before delivering chips to the customer. The study has an objective to improve usability and productivity of the tools, by introducing metrics. The results of the measurements drive a concrete plan of action. The GQM (Goal, Questions, Metrics) methodology was used to define and gather data for the measurements. The project was developed in two parts or phases. We took the measurements using the method over the two phases of the tool development. The findings from phase one improved the tool usability in the second phase. The lesson learnt is that tool usability is a complex measurement. Improving usability means that the user will use less of the tool help button; the user will have less downtime and will not input incorrect data. Even though for this study the focus was on three important tools, the same usability metrics can be applied to the remaining five tools. For defining productivity metrics, we also used the GQM methodology. A productivity measurement using historic data was done to establish a baseline. The baseline measurements identified some existing bottlenecks in the overall silicon debug process. We link productivity to time it takes for a debug tool user to complete the assigned task(s). The total time taken for using all the tools does not give us any actionable items for improving productivity. We will need to measure the time it takes for use of each tool in the debug process to give us actionable items. This is identified as future work. To improve usability we recommend making tools that are more robust to error handling and having good help features. To improve productivity we recommend getting data on where the user is spending most of the debug time. Then, we can focus on improving that time-consuming part of debug to make the users more productive. / text

Πραγματοποιήθηκε έρευνα σχετικά με την αξιολόγηση της ευχρηστίας εκπαιδευτικού λογισμικού, καθώς και της ευχρηστίας ιστότοπου εκπαιδευτικού ιδρύματος βασισμένη σε μεθόδους παρατήρησης χρηστών. Σε πρώτη φάση έγινε η εγκατάσταση του εργαστηρίου αξιολόγηση ποιότητας. σε δεύτερη φάση έγιναν εργαστηριακά πειράματα με αντικείμενο την αξιολόγηση της ευχρηστίας του ανανεωμένου ιστότοπου του ΕΑΠ και της ευχρηστίας λογισμικού φυσικής που χρησιμοποιείται για εκπαίδευση από απόσταση. / A research referring to usability of educational software and web site o HOU based on users observation methods was contacted. First face laboratory installation-s/w installation and second face the experiment performance.

Webserver logfiles are an inexpensive, automatically captured text-based recording of user interactions with a website. In this thesis, a tool, ViDLog, was created to take logfiles and reanimate a user session with the purpose of gaining usability insights. To evaluate the effectiveness and value of reanimating user sessions, 10 usability professionals viewed logfile-recorded website usage using ViDLog and were then asked to infer users’ goals, strategies, successes or failures, and proficiencies; and afterwards, rate, ViDLog across multiple dimensions. ViDLog’s logfile reanimation proved successful for gaining usability insights; usability professionals were able to infer users’ goals, strategies, successes or failures, and proficiencies. Participants were able to do this without ViDLog training, without familiarity of the website being evaluated (Orlando), and without domain knowledge of the subject depicted in the user sessions (women’s literature). However, they were only able to infer users’ overarching goal, not specific goal criteria; and were only able to determine relative proficiencies after viewing both user sessions. They also expended a good deal of mental effort when comprehending ambiguous user sessions, and found inefficiencies in ViDLog’s user interface. / Dr. Susan Brown for The Orlando Project

Hand held device users encounter various forms of distraction in their daily lives. Distractions may prevent them from correctly using the hand held device. Usability evaluations are meant to identify issues prior to end-users experiencing them. However the laboratory environment, which usability evaluations are conducted, may not reflect the real-world conditions that devices are used. The experiment involved each participant performing tasks in both a quiet and a noisy environment. The noisy environment emulated part of a real-world experience by adding social noise in the background during the participant's tasks. The goal was to compare how much insight each participant was able to achieve from the data in each of the environments. It was found that task performance accuracy was higher in a quiet environment as opposed to the noisy environment. The mental demands and frustration of participants were found to be higher during the noisy environment evaluation.

As smartphones become more ubiquitous, increasing amounts of information about smartphone users are created, collected, and shared. This information may pose privacy and security risks to the smartphone user. The risks may vary from government surveillance to theft of financial information. Previous work in the area of smartphone privacy and security has both identified specific security flaws and examined users’ expectations and behaviors. However, there has not been a broad examination of the smartphone ecosystem to determine the risks to users from smartphone data sharing and the possible mitigations. Two of the five studies in this work examine the smartphone data sharing ecosystem to identify risks and mitigations. The first study uses multi-stakeholder expert interviews to identify risks to users and the mitigations. A second study examines app developers in order to quantify the risky behaviors and identify opportunities to improve security and privacy. In the remaining three of five studies discussed in this work, we examine one specific risk mitigation that has been popular with policy-makers: privacy notices for consumers. If done well, privacy notices should inform smartphone users about the risks and allow them to make informed decisions about data collection. Unfortunately, previous research has found that existing privacy notices do not help smartphone users, as they are neither noticed nor understood. Through user studies, we evaluate options to improve notices. We identify opportunities to capture the attention of users and improve understanding by examining the timing and content of notices. Overall, this work attempts to inform public policy around smartphone privacy and security. We find novel opportunities to mitigate risks by understanding app developers’ work and behaviors. Also, recognizing the current focus on privacy notices, we attempt to frame the debate by examining how users’ attention to and comprehension of notices can be improved through content and timing.

Machine-readable privacy policies have been developed to help reduce user effort in understanding how websites will use personally identifiable information (PII). The goal of these policies is to enable the user to make informed decisions about the disclosure of personal information in web-based transactions. However, these privacy policies are complex, requiring that a user agent evaluate conformance between the user’s privacy preferences and the site’s privacy policy, and indicate this conformance information to the user. The problem addressed in this thesis is that even with machine-readable policies and current user agents, it is still difficult for users to determine the cause and origin of a conflict between privacy preferences and privacy policies. The problem arises partly because current standards operate at the page level: they do not allow a fine-grained treatment of conformance down to the level of a specific field in a web form. In this thesis the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) is extended to enable field-level comparisons, field-specific conformance displays, and faster access to additional field-specific conformance information. An evaluation of a prototype agent based on these extensions showed that they allow users to more easily understand how the website privacy policy relates to the user’s privacy preferences, and where conformance conflicts occur.

In the automotive industry, the complexity of electronic components is increasing rapidly. Modern functional safety standards rely on strict requirements engineering techniques in order to ensure the safety of a given system. Current requirements management tools on the market either suffer in their ability to handle such constraints or are not susceptible to industrial applicability. To solve this problem, two main questions have been focused in this master thesis. How to visualise the requirements and their relationship to architecture and how to provide a solution that reflects on how work is conducted today at Scania. A prototype with focus on visualisation of requirements and their relationship to architectures has been developed. To provide an intuitive solution that reflects on how work is conducted, an evaluation of the prototype has been conducted. The prototype was evaluated by engineers at Scania that works with requirements in their daily work. The conclusion of the evaluation suggests that visualisation of requirements and their relation to architecture could be beneficial for requirement engineering. To keep the solution intuitive it is important to focus on filtering methods for the visualisation in future development.

Procedures are standardized lists of instructions that designate the safe and accepted way of accomplishing a task. This study intended to develop and compare the usability of paper-based industrial operating procedures. Two procedures at a plant were redesigned with evidence-based guidelines and human factors input. 16 operators of varying experience were asked to read through and assess the new and old procedures. The new procedures were rated significantly or moderately better than their predecessors for efficiency, effectiveness, and subjective satisfaction. On average, inexperienced operators reported fewer inaccuracies, more confusion, and higher workload ratings than their experienced counterparts, regardless of procedure type or area. For satisfaction, experienced and inexperienced operators reported similar ratings across both procedure types and areas. Future studies should attempt to discern which particular change in the procedures contributed the most to increased usability, and whether operator experience significantly correlates with usability ratings.

Procedures are standardized lists of instructions that designate the safe and accepted way of accomplishing a task. This study intended to develop and compare the usability of paper-based industrial operating procedures. Two procedures at a plant were redesigned with evidence-based guidelines and human factors input. 16 operators of varying experience were asked to read through and assess the new and old procedures. The new procedures were rated significantly or moderately better than their predecessors for efficiency, effectiveness, and subjective satisfaction. On average, inexperienced operators reported fewer inaccuracies, more confusion, and higher workload ratings than their experienced counterparts, regardless of procedure type or area. For satisfaction, experienced and inexperienced operators reported similar ratings across both procedure types and areas. Future studies should attempt to discern which particular change in the procedures contributed the most to increased usability, and whether operator experience significantly correlates with usability ratings.

This thesis shows that human factors can have a large and direct impact on security, not only on the user’s satisfaction, but also on the level of security achieved in practice. The usability issues identified are also extended to include mental models and perceptions as well as traditional user interface issues. These findings were accomplished through three studies using various methodologies to best suit their aims. The research community have issued principles to better align security and usability, so it was first necessary to evaluate their effectiveness. The chosen method for achieving this was through a usability study of the most recent software specifically to use these principles. It was found that the goal of being simultaneously usable and secure was not entirely met, partially through problems identified with the software interface, but largely due to the user’s perceptions and actions whilst using the software. This makes it particularly difficult to design usable and secure software without detailed knowledge of the users attitudes and perceptions, especially if we are not to blame the user for security errors as has occurred in the past. Particular focus was given to e-mail security because it is an area in which there is a massive number of vectors for security threats, and in which it is technologically possible to negate most of these threats, yet this is not occurring. Interviews were used to gain in depth information from the user’s point of view. Data was collected from individual e-mail users from the general public, and organisations. It was found that although the literature had identified various problems with the software and process of e-mail encryption, the majority of problems identified in the interviews stemmed once again from user’s perceptions and attitudes. Use of encryption was virtually nil, although the desire to use encryption to protect privacy was strong. Remembering secure passwords was recurrently found to be problematic, so in an effort to propose a specific method of increasing their usability an empirical experiment was used to examine the memorability of passwords. Specially constructed passwords were tested for their ability to improve memorability, and therefore usability. No statistical significance in the construction patterns was found, but a memory phenomenon whereby users tend to forget their password after a specific period of non-use was discovered. The findings are discussed with reference to the fact that they all draw on a theme of responsibility to maintain good security, both from the perspective of the software developer and the end user. The term Personal Liability and General Use Evaluation (PLaGUE) is introduced to highlight the importance of considering these responsibilities and their effect on the use of security.