Orientador: Luis Carlos Paschoarelli / Banca: João Pedro Albino / Banca: José Carlos Plácido da Silva / Resumo: As interfaces de sites institucionais devem basear-se em princípios de usabilidade, cujo propósito é garantir a informação de forma segura, eficiente e efetiva às audiências e a seus respectivos usuários. Os princípios teóricos sobre recomendações para o desenvolvimento de sites apresentam-se amplamente disponíveis, mas a aplicação destes, verificados com ferramentas especializadas, continuam sendo fundamentais para o alcance da efetiva usabilidade. O presente estudo objetivou testar a ferramenta CMS (Content Management System) durante o desenvolvimento de um site institucional do Programa de Pós-graduação em design da Universidade Estadual Paulista, visando ao melhoramento de sua usabilidade. Os procedimentos metodológicos caracterizaram-se por cinco etapas, iniciando-se pela revisão teórica e seguindo por aplicações laboratoriais e de simulações práticas, as quais se caracterizaram pela evolução alternada de etapas de análise, desenvolvimento de protótipo, e reanálise, resultando em um protótipo final. Esses resultados foram considerados satisfatórios, pois foi verificado que a aplicação de ferramentas CMS no desenvolvimento de sites institucionais melhora seus níveis de usabilidade. Entretanto, a principal contribuição do presente estudo está na conquista de novos conhecimentos decorrentes dos experimentos realizados, bem como no incremento dos temas ligados ao design de interfaces, à usabilidade e à ergonomia informacional, os quais colaboram de forma efetiva para o desenvolvimento do design ergonômico / Abstract: The interfaces of institutional sites must be based on usability principles, whose purpose is to ensure the security, efficient and effective information to audiences and their users. The theoretical principles of recommendations for site development have become widely available, but he implementation of them checked with specialized tools remain be fundamental to the achievement of effective usability. This study aimed to test the CMS tool (Content Management System) during the development of an institutional site of the Graduate Program in Design at the Universidade Estadual Paulista intended to improve its usability. The methodological procedures were characterized by five steps, starting by the review theory and following by laboratory applications and practices simulations, which were characterized by alternating stages of development testing, prototype development, and reanalysis, resulting in a final prototype. These results were considered satisfactory, because it was verified that the use of CMS tools in the development of institucional sites improved their levels of usability. However, the main contribution of this study is to acquire new knowledge resulting from experiments, as well as the increase in issued related to interface design, usability and ergonomic information, which collaborate effectively for the development of ergonomic design / Mestre

O objetivo principal deste estudo é o de verificar se condições adequadas de usabilidade técnica e pedagógica interferem nos desempenhos das aprendizagens de alunos em e-learning. Para tanto, são propostos comparativos em duas condições distintas de experimentos. Em um experimento, os alunos interagem com um material de aprendizagem que não utiliza condições de usabilidade técnica e pedagógica; e em outro experimento, interagem com um material de aprendizagem que apresenta condições adequadas de usabilidade técnica e pedagógica implementadas. Na aplicação dos experimentos propostos pela metodologia, os alunos interagem com o material de aprendizagem, respondem ao teste de desempenho, e em seguida avaliam a usabilidade técnica e pedagógica através do questionário de avaliação da usabilidade. Este estudo proporciona uma base de questões de usabilidade técnica e pedagógica conforme categorias de usabilidade e critérios específicos para materiais em e-learning. Também são apresentados os pontos críticos e facilitadores de usabilidade conforme a avaliação dos alunos. No sentido de comprovar se a usabilidade técnica e pedagógica proporciona um desempenho significativo aos alunos em e-learning são analisadas as significâncias das diferenças entre as médias de desempenhos dos alunos entre os dois experimentos, entre as médias de desempenhos considerando-se somente as questões respondidas, a correlação entre a usabilidade e o desempenho, e as questões de usabilidade significativas ao desempenho. Através de tais análises pôde-se concluir por meio dos resultados obtidos que apesar de não ter sido comprovada a significância para todas as análises que abrangeram a avaliação do impacto da usabilidade técnica e pedagógica sobre o desempenho de aprendizes em e-learning, pôde-se comprovar que a usabilidade apresentou uma interferência significativa sobre o desempenho. Outras variáveis, tais como a idade, o gênero, o conhecimento prévio sobre o conteúdo proposto para o experimento e a opinião da importância do conteúdo para a aprendizagem também foram analisadas no sentido de verificar possíveis interferências quanto ao desempenho dos alunos. Verificou-se que as variáveis de gênero e experiência prévia do conteúdo proposto apresentaram interferência significativa sobre o desempenho para os alunos que utilizaram o material de aprendizagem sob condições adequadas de usabilidade técnica e pedagógica. / The main purpose of this study is to verify whether appropriate conditions of technical and pedagogical usability interfere with students' performance in e-learning. Thus, comparisons are made with two distinct types of experiments. In one experiment, the student interacts with a learning material that does not feature any conditions of technical and pedagogical usability; in the other, the student interacts with the learning material with implemented conditions of technical and pedagogical usability. In the process of the experiments suggested by the methodology, the student interacts with the learning material, takes the performance test, and right after assesses the technical and pedagogical usability through the usability evaluation questionnaire. This study provides a basis for technical and pedagogical usability issues regarding categories of usability and specific criteria for e-learning material. Critical points and usability facilitators are also presented based on the students' assessment. Aiming to prove that the technological and pedagogical usability provides a significant performance to e-learning students, we analyzed the significance of the differences among students' performance averages between the two experiments, among performance averages taking into account only answered questions, the correlation between usability and performance, and usability questions significant to the performance. Based on such analyses, one could conclude from the results obtained that, although the significance of all analyses involving the evaluation of the impact of technical and pedagogical usability on performance had not been proven, one could actually prove that usability showed a significant interference with the performance. Other variables, such as age, gender, previous knowledge of the content proposed for the experiment and the opinion on the importance of the content for learning were also analyzed so as to verify possible interferences regarding the students' performance. The variables of gender and previous experience of the proposed content presented a significant interference with the performance of students who utilized the learning material under adequate conditions of technical and pedagogical usability.

Many everyday systems and products seem to be designed with little regard to usability. This leads to the frustration, wasted time and errors. So the usability of the product is important for its survival in the market. In many previous studies the usability evaluation of the iPhone and iPad carried out individually and very little work has been done on the comparative usability evaluation. However, there was not any study conducted on the comparative usability evaluation and measuring the performance of the iPhone versus iPad in a controlled environment. In this research work, the authors performed the comparative usability evaluation and measured the performances of the iPhone and iPad on the selected applications by considering the young users as well as the elderly users. Another objective of this study is to identify the usability issues in performances of the iPhone and iPad. A survey and experiment techniques were used to achieve the dened objectives. The survey questionnaire consisted of 42 statements that presented the different usability aspects. The objectives of the survey study were to validate the identified issues from the literature study, identify new issues and measure the signicant difference in user opinions for the iPhone and iPad. However, the experiment studies helped to measure the performance significances between the devices against the three user groups (novice user, experienced user, elderly user) and among the groups over the devices. Further, objective was to measure the satisfaction level of the participated users against the iPhone and iPad. The experiment was performed in a controlled environment. Total six tasks (two tasks per application) were dened and each participant performed the same task on both devices. Generally the authors found that the participants performed better on the iPad with lower error rates as compare to the iPhone. / The aim of this study was to evaluate and measure the comparative usability performances of the iPhone an iPad. The preliminary focus of the study was to nd the usability issues regarding both the devices. Several dierent methods have been used in the study when investigating the answers of predened research questions. The study in this thesis was a literature review, a survey study and an empirical usability testing experiment. In the literature review, the authors studied the dierent usability issues such as inconsistency in applications, applications crashes and accidental errors.The detail list of the issues also presented in Table 2. However, the survey responses validated such issues and highlighted some additional issues such as low battery time, Blue-tooth connectivity problems, wireless connectivity problem, week signal strength and missing help. Two participants commented on the missing of a swyping feature. According to them if the iPhone and iPad had such feature then their typing performance should be improved. A survey study was conducted to evaluate and measure the significance in the four main parts of the devices i.e. system, touch screen, keypad and applications. Each part contained the multiple related statements that explored the different usability aspects. The detail and results of each statement are given in Table 4. After the statistical analysis, the authors did not nd a signicant dierence between the statements regarding the iPhone and iPad apart from in four statements. In the two statements (i.e. nding a new application in the Apple store and replacing the contents location on the interface) the users agreed that the iPad performance was better than the iPhone. However, in the other two statements (i.e. use of system in the sun light and zooming gestures) they preferred the iPhone rather than the iPad. Its means 90.47% users addressed the same issues in the iPhone and iPad. There is no dierence in their preferences regarding the iPhone and iPad. 4.76% users preferred the iPhone and 4.46% users preferred the iPad in above mentioned conditions. The empirical usability testing experiment focused on studying the usability performances of the iPhone and iPad considering three target groups. The performances comparisons were conducted by comparing the dierent participants groups and both devices. In total 60 users participated in the empirical usability performance testing study. The selection of the participants was based on their earlier experience with mobile phones usage. The detail of the participant are given in Figure 13. The comparisons results of the participant groups are shown in Table 7, the devices in Table 8 and the errors on both devices in Table 9 provided the signicance in the performances. The novice users versus experienced users comparison results across the iPhone (all six tasks) and the iPad (rst ve tasks) presented that the experienced users performed faster than the novice users with lower error rate. The results of the novice users versus elderly user comparison presented that the novice user using the iPhone ( first four tasks) and using the iPad (facebook login, location close view, new note and Evernote logout) performed faster than the elderly users with lower error rate. Similarly the results in the last comparison of the experienced users versus elderly users shown that the experienced users performed all the six tasks faster than the elderly users with lower error rate. Based on such nding the authors can conclude that the experienced users performances were better than the other two groups on both devices. The authors can also conclude that if someone is using the iPhone he/she could easily use the iPad. In the devices comparison results, the performances of the iPad across the novice users (in tasks facebook login, send a message, location close view, new note Evernote logout), the experienced users (in tasks facebook login, send a message, location close view and new note) and the elderly users (st ve tasks) were better than the iPhone with lower error rate. Base on such ndings of the empirical usability testing, the authors conclude that in the controlled environment the performance of the iPad was better than the iPhone. Three participant groups performed each task faster on the iPad than the iPhone apart from in one task. The task named location identication the iPhone and iPad performed the same across the novice user and experienced user but across the elderly user, the iPad performed better than the iPhone. Table 10 presents the results of the satisfaction level of the participants in a control environment for both devices. The satisfaction level acquired through the post test questionnaire during the experiment. The results of the novice users and the experienced users presented that their satisfaction levels were higher for the iPad than the iPhone. The experienced users results shown that their satisfaction levels were same for the iPhone as well as for the iPad. However, with the keypads performances they looked more satisfied on the iPad than the iPhone. / Near Chungi number 1 Chitterpari Mirpur Azad Kashmir Pakistan.

The use of geographical data is increasing in real world applications and due to this, Geographic information systems (GIS) are a growing interest area for research nowadays. Today, GIS is combined with the World Wide Web (WWW) to provide information to a lot of people. Web-based GIS applications have gained popularity because of their easy use and simplicity. Through browsers, web-based GIS applications can display maps with features like buildings, forests, roads and even traffic. Furthermore spatial data can be analyzed and large amounts of data can be viewed on small screens by zooming and panning the map. So having all the above features, effective web-based GIS applications should be designed in a way that they should be easy to use and understand for users. Usability evaluation is becoming an important part of Interaction Design to find out the user´s needs and requirements. In this study two web-based GIS applications (Google Maps and MapQuest) are evaluated to find out usability problems. To accomplish the main goal of this study, different techniques are used. Special criteria are adopted for usability evaluation of these two web-based GIS applications. Usability tests have been performed with six graduate users and questionnaires were filled out by these users. Interviews were conducted with six users to validate the results. The authors have provided a number of suggestions based on the problems that were identified in this study for Google Maps and MapQuest to improve the usability of these applications.

Mass production of consumer products is both wasteful and limit the consumers' power to influence the design of what they are buying. When shopping for a product, the customer must choose between a range of specific products with limited variations. What if the customer could make all the design choices, creating and buying the product according to his or her own needs? A 3D product generator holding a configurable model of a product was created to replace static content in online stores and give creative power to customers. This work aimed at creating an effective 3D product generator by evaluating how users experience the design of and interaction with it, and finding general design goals when introducing interactive 3D content in static 2D environments. A prototype of a 3D product generator in a generic online storefront was implemented in two iterations, improving on and evaluating the design through usability testing. The evaluation of the final prototype suggested that the interface was indeed effective in both design and interaction. This work concludes that user feedback is crucial to creating a successful user experience, which in turn is important when creating interfaces for product configuration.

As the use of mobile devices is increasing and the use of laptops and computers is decreasing it is becoming more important to design for better web usability across platforms. The established design principles for web design provide guidelines when designing and testing web usability. The principles, however, are not commonly used to evaluate and test the usability of mobile websites. This study seeks to examine how the usability of mobile and desktop websites is affected based on the adaption of established web design principles. The study is built upon an analytical framework where common keywords have been selected from a selection of established web design principles. This study takes on a qualitative approach with experimental features, using a heuristic evaluation, a usability study and an eye-tracking experiment. The study indicates that there is a connection between low adaption of certain keywords of web design principles and the usability of mobile and desktop websites, contributing to a deeper understanding of how adaption of design principles affect web usability across platforms. / Användningen av mobila enheter har på senare tid ökat och användningen av bärbara datorer och stationära datorer har minskat. Det blir därför allt viktigare att designa mer användarvänliga hemsidor på olika plattformar. Etablerade design principer för webbdesign anger riktlinjer för design och test av webbanvändbarhet. Design principer används inte i en större utsträckning för att utvärdera användbarheten på mobila hemsidor, därför syftar denna studie till att undersöka hur användbarheten för mobilhemsidor påverkas utifrån att tillämpningen av design principer för webbdesign. Studien bygger på ett analytiskt ramverk där nyckelord har valts ut från ett antal etablerade webbdesign principer. Studien har ett kvalitativt tillvägagångssätt, med experimentella inslag. Studien har genomförts genom heuristik utvärdering, användbarhets studier och eye-tracking experiment. Studien indikerar att det finns en koppling mellan lägre nivåer av tillämpning av webbdesign principer och användbarheten på mobil- och datorsanpassade hemsidor. Denna studie bidrar till en djupare förståelse om hur anpassningen av design principer och dess påverkan av användbarheten på hemsidor över olika plattformar.

Open-source software is becoming a gradually more popular as a software development method; some of the most successful softwares are for example: the Linux operating system, Mozilla, Apache web server and openoffice.org. Open source softwares viewed by many as being very good in terms of their usage, reliability, performance and market share. Mostly open source software developer focus on functionality and different feature of the software; on the other hand they ignore the user centric design requirement. In this thesis the importance of the usability in Open source applications, such as Openoffice.org are described and how usability can be measured by assessing user performance such as, satisfaction, effectiveness and acceptability. Openoffice.org is a freely available office suite in different operating system and with different languages. The OpenOffice.org 3.0 feature set is similar to the feature set of Microsoft Office 2003. It has word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications all together within a common suite. But still this application suite is not much familiar among common users that cause a major usability threat for usability studies. The basic purposed of this thesis was to find out the issues and users satisfaction regarding this Openoffice.org. Empirical method of usability assessment such as thinks aloud, Questionnaires and interviews were used. / Folkparkvagen 20 Lag 10 Ronneby 37240 Sweden Mobile number 0046-700183591

The purpose of this study is to evaluate and give suggestions for interaction improvements to a user interface in a Personal Video Recorder. The study will focus on user learnability, user satisfaction, usability problems from the user interaction with the product and to make a set of interaction improvements. The participants performed a set of predefined tasks involving the recorder functionality and channel lists. The study involved three trials with seven tasks in each trial.   The study showed that the time difference for Learnability – Time-on-Task between all trials were statistical significant for the user interface. The study also revealed a set of usability problems that were classified into different severity ratings. The study also showed that the participants were partly satisfied with the user interface. / Uppsatsen är egentligen på 18hp, var tvungen att fylla i 16hp då rätt alternativ inte fanns att tillgå.

This thesis aimed to evaluate the user interaction with a Personal Video Recorder software in development by Zenterio. The evaluation focus was on learnability, satisfaction, identification of usability issues and proposing redesign to solve them. A user test with eleven participants was carried out, measuring task success, completion time, lostness, post-task satisfaction and post-session satisfaction across three trials. The seven user tasks concerned mainly channel lists and recording functionality; the former is examined closer in this paper. The results showed that the channel lists were somewhat difficult to manage initially but fairly quickly learned. The satisfaction was lower in the beginning and high after three trials. The results across all tasks followed similar learnability patterns and the overall satisfaction with the interface interaction pointed at the need of improvements. Nine usability issues were discovered concerning channel lists and navigation; they were rated by severity and redesign proposals were given. The issue with the strongest impact on the success of the interaction was the difficulty to find out how to open the submenus.

Aus Punkt 1: "Warum lohnt sich Semiotik gerade im Bereich Usability und Design? Mehr noch, die Semiotik als übergreifende Perspektive ist hier gar nicht zu vermeiden. (Vermeidbar ist allenfalls der Soziolekt bzw. Technolekt der akademischen Semiotik, nicht aber ein semiotisches Arbeiten selbst.) Das Denken vieler Designer ist eher visuell geprägt. Diese Ausrichtung auf non-verbale Formen und Handlungen scheint der Semiotik entgegen zu stehen. Die Semiotik hat zwar eine starke Tradition in der Linguistik, aber diese stellt nur eine von mehreren gleichwertigen Zugängen dar: Man denke etwa an die Medizin (wo visuelle und sonstige Symptome als Zeichen gedeutet werden), an die Malerei (wo es Repräsentationen für ästhetische, soziale und politische Entsprechungen gibt), an die Gestik (wo jede kleinere oder größere Bewegung eines Muskels mit Bedeutungen verknüpft ist) oder an die Musik (wo sehr abstrakte Tonfolgen mit emotionaler Dynamik verbunden sind) – dazu etwa Eco (2002), Nöth (2000), Hucklenbroich (2003), Mazzola (2003) sowie Grammer (2004). ..."