Avi Parush

Welcome to the second issue of volume 2 of JUS! Joe Dumas, one of the pioneers in usability testing and a member of our editorial board, is offering an enlightening and personal perspective on the relatively short history of the usability profession. In his invited essay entitled: “A Great Leap Forward: The Birth of the […] [(English) Read More]

Joe Dumas

In a recent editorial in this journal, Arnie Lund (2006) talked about “post-modern usability.” He urged us to move into a post-modern era in which we embrace “…both the existential understanding of the user in context as we design experiences that capture every aspect of the user…”(p.4) I agree with Arnie, but I am concerned […] [(English) Read More]

Shazeeye Kirmani, Shanmugam Rajasekaran

Abstract Heuristic Evaluation is a discount usability engineering method involving three or more evaluators who evaluate the compliance of an interface based on a set of heuristics. Because the quality of the evaluation is highly dependent on their skills, it is critical to measure these skills to ensure evaluations are of a certain standard. This […] [(English) Read More]

Mathew Scotch, Bambang Parmanto, Valerie Monaco

Abstract Increasingly sophisticated technologies, such as On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Geospatial Information Systems (GIS), are being leveraged for conducting community health assessments (CHA). Little is known about the usability of OLAP and GIS interfaces with respect to CHA. We conducted an iterative usability evaluation of the Spatial OLAP Visualization and Analysis Tool (SOVAT), a […] [(English) Read More]

Whitney Quesenbery, John Cugini, Dana Chisnell, Bill Killam, Ginny Redish

In the article, “A Methodology for Testing Voting Systems” (JUS, November 2006, pp7-21), Selker, Rosenzweig, and Pandolfo discuss their methodology for usability testing of voting systems. With so much at stake in the usability of our ballots and voting systems, we can only applaud any research in this field. There is little history of research in […] [(English) Read More]

Ted Selker, Elizabeth Rosenzweig, Anna Pandolfo

We appreciate the authors (Quesenbery, Cugini, Chisnell, Killam, and Redish, in this issue) acknowledging the lack of research in the field of usability of voting systems. We hope that our early experiments guide people to push the work further, and to create experiments that are more efficient and are rich in useful data. http://vote.caltech.edu/media/documents/wps/vtp_wp 24.pdf […] [(English) Read More]