Avi Parush

Welcome to the fourth issue of the Journal of Usability Studies. In this issue: Most of the articles in this issue have a global flavor addressing issues of international, cross-cultural aspects of usability. The invited essay is written by Elizabeth Rosenzweig who leads the UPA international initiative of the World Usability Day. In her essay […] [Read More]

Elizabeth Rosenzweig

Introduction Every citizen on our planet deserves the right to usable products and services. It is time we reframe our work and look at a bigger global picture. The time is right, the interest is here. ‘User friendly’ is a common and understandable term; people understand that the world should work well. Now, we have […] [Read More]

Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, Ravi Vatrapu

Abstract A major impediment in global user interface development is that there is inadequate empirical evidence for the effects of culture in the usability engineering methods used for developing these global user interfaces. This paper presents a controlled study investigating the effects of culture on the effectiveness of structured interviews in international usability evaluation. The experiment consisted of a usability […] [Read More]

Konstantinos Chorianopoulos

Abstract Animated characters have been a popular research theme, but the respective desktop applications have not been well-received by end-users. The objective of this study was to evaluate the use of an animated character for presenting information and navigating music videos within an interactive television (ITV) application. Information was displayed over music video clips with […] [Read More]

Kraig Finstad

Abstract The System Usability Scale (SUS) was administered verbally to native English and non-native English speakers for several internally deployed applications. It was found that a significant proportion of non-native English speakers failed to understand the word “cumbersome” in Item 8 of the SUS (that is, “I found the system to be very cumbersome to […] [Read More]