White Papers
Using Partial Designs to Elicit Requirements in Web Development - A Survey of Commercial Practice
Dr John Eklund, Usability Analyst and Instructional Technologist, UX Research, Sydney Australia.
Professor David Lowe, Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning) Faculty of Engineering, University of Technology, Sydney
Abstract
In this paper we describe our research that examines the activities in the commercial web development lifecycle, particularly in gathering and defining requirements. Often requirements are inadequately documented, or only emerge during development, or change as development proceeds. We offer an iterative model for Web systems development that incorporates the use of partial design prototypes as a crucial tool in resolving requirements. This is derived from an analysis of the results of a survey of commercial Web practice. The results support the increasingly accepted premise that within commercial Web development, design artifacts become a crucial element in supporting client understanding and driving the formulation of requirements.
The ROI of Usability Testing
Abstract
Usability Testing as a means of ensuring the quality of software or websites is a process that is gaining mainstream acceptance as an essential component of the software development lifecycle, though it’s sometimes misunderstood by development teams. In this article, Dr John Eklund, a senior usability consultant, discusses usability testing and its ROI.
The Return of Investment of Usability Testing (Paper). This is a revised version of a publication in The Australian Computer Society’s Information Age Journal, 2006.
A Study of User Model Based Link Annotation in Educational Hypermedia
Peter Brusilovsky (Human-Computer Interaction Institute,Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
John Eklund (UX Research, Australia)
Abstract: Adaptive link annotation is a new direction within the field of user-model based interfaces. It is a specific technique in Adaptive Navigation Support (ANS) whose aim is to help users find an appropriate path in a learning and information space by adapting link presentation to the goals, knowledge, and other characteristics of an individual user. More specifically, ANS has been implemented on the WWW in the InterBook system as link annotation indicating several states such as visited, ready to be learned, or not ready to be learned. These states represent an expert’s suggested path for an individual user through a learning space according to both a history-based (tracking where the user has been), and a pre-requisite based (indexing of content as a set of domain model concepts) annotation. This particular process has been more fully described elsewhere [Brusilovsky, Eklund & Schwarz 1998].
In this paper we show that ANS provided learners with the confidence to adopt less sequential paths through the learning space. Considering ANS tools comprised a minimal part of the interface in the experiment, we show that they functioned reliably well. Discussion and suggestions for further research are provided.
Keywords: AdaptiveHypermedia, Evaluation, Hypertext, Navigation, Navigation support, User Model, WWW
Adaptive Textbooks of the World Wide Web
John Eklund, UX Research, formerly of The Faculty of Education, The University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.
Peter Brusilovsky, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
Elmar Schwarz, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA
Keywords
adaptive, authoring, hypermedia, navigation, textbook, user-model, WWW
Abstract
This paper examines some recent research in the area of adaptive navigation support, a class of adaptation in user-model based interfaces, and specifically discusses the authoring and delivery tool for adaptive electronic textbooks (ETs) called Interbook, implemented on the WWW. Interbook uses history-based, knowledge-based and prerequisite-based adaptive annotation of links to suggest to the individual user an appropriate path through a learning space. We describe the authoring environment and the principles upon which it is based, and discuss our efforts to experiment with, and to evaluate, this tool.
