20100926 - Lee, D&D of User Interfaces for Small Screen Computers

The design and development of user interfaces for small screen computers by Lee, Kwang Bok, Ph.D., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2003 , 175 pages; AAT 3098862 My Interest: 1) Usability testing. Note: His write-up on Usability Testing is extensive. 2) Problems of small screen computers. Action: To read specific parts of Dissertation in future. Problem Statement The increasing availability of small size computers, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), Palm pilots or handheld devices, with the ability to transmit information over wireless networks has enormously enhanced opportunities for researchers. However, these devices have difficulty displaying information because of their hardware constraints, such as small screens, small storage, low speed, and low power. Research Goal This thesis introduces two methods for solving these problems. Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUI) First, providing zoomable user interfaces (ZUI) introduces many zooming applications such as a file zoom, a focus zoom, and a search zoom which are based on geometric and semantic zooming methods. The file zooming applications use dynamic zoom-in and zoom-out functions for visualizing large amounts of information on the PDA screen. The focus zooming applications are based on a magnifying glass lens that is a 2D visualization for large rectangular presentations that allows a user to quickly focus on a part of the PDA screen. Finally, the thesis describes the search zooming applications for easy recognition and comparison of the content of files on the screen. Adaptive User Interfaces (AUI) With the proliferation of PDAs, people are using such small devices to access the web; however, the web is not accommodating such access. For small device users, we introduce adaptive user interfaces (AUI) based on an efficient method for extracting readable documents from XML-based files, which will be used for information streams for mobile Internet access. We design a selector for handling information streams to extract the customized information based on the user request for the small devices. The selector's attributes can be adapted from the XML documents, and then works on translating information streams into the new file that will be displayed on the devices. Also, the selector has visual menu interfaces so that users can easily choose each attribute according to their preferences. This is developed to devise an efficient method for the small devices' problems. Usability Testing Furthermore, we prepare usability testing for the applications in order to find usability problems, and then we offer suggestions for improving the usability of the applications. The prototypes and implementations of these approaches will be also provided in this thesis. Comments: Softcopy Dissertation is scanned version; cannot copy and paste; difficult to blog about it. 1.3.3 Usability testing Chapter 5 Usability Testing for Small Screen Computers Page 52 – 87 Content (the entire Chapter 5) looks very good…for my reading. Must read!

Oct 22 - Dissertations...Mobile Learning, E-Learning Effectiveness, Learner Satisfaction, Online Learning Usability, Mobile Application Usability

Keywords searched:
1 Mobile Learning
2 E-Learning Effectiveness
3 Learner Satisfaction
4 Online Learning Usability
5 Mobile Application Usability
6 E-Learning (to be continued...)

Dissertations were searched and downloaded using ProQuest.

Abitt, Jason T. The Development of an Evaluation Framework for a Web-Based Course Management System in Higher Education. [Dissertation, PhD] University of Idaho. May 2005.

Colbry, Kathleen Tamara Luchini. Design Guidelines for Developing Scaffolded, Handheld Software to Support Learners during Science Inquiry. [Dissertation, PhD (Computer Science & Engineering)] The University of Michigan. 2005.

Elshair, Hanan M. The Strategies Used By Students To Read Educational Websites and Their Relation to Website Usability and Text Design. [dissertation, Doctor of Education] University of Pittsburgh. 2002.

Esch, Thomas J. E-Learning Effectiveness: An Examination of Online Training Methods for Training End-Users of New Technology Systems. [Dissertation, PhD in Business Administration] Touro University International. April 2003.

Ezzedine, Shadi Najib. Design Guidelines for Wireless Distributed Learning at Royal Roads University. [Thesis, M.A. in Distributed Learning] Royal Roads University. Nov 18, 2003.

Friend, Jean Rose. Website Usefulness for Third Agers: A Case Study of Older Adults and Senior Related Websites. [Dissertation, PhD] University of Virginia. Jan 2001.

Gamble, Angela L. The Effectiveness of E-Learning in a Multicultural Environment. [Dissertation, PhD] Capella University. Jan 2009.

Goode, Christina M. Evaluating the Quality, Usability, and Potential Effectiveness of Online Learning Modules: A Case Study of Teaching with Technology Grant Recipients at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. [Dissertation, Doctor of Education] The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dec 2003.

Harmons, Eric M. A Usability Study of A Post-Conference Online Self-Assessment Program for Healthcare Professionals. [Thesis, M.A.] Texas Woman's University, Denton, Texas. Aug 2005.

Karlson, Amy Kathleen. Interface and Interaction Design for One-Handed Mobile Computing. [Dissertation, PhD] University of Maryland, College Park. 2007.

Lai, Horng-Ji. Evaluation of WWW On-Line Courseware Usability. [Dissertation, PhD] University of Idaho. May 2004.

Lavoie, Marie-Claude. Enabling Contextual MLearning: Design Recommendations for a Context-Appropriate User Interface Enabling Mobile Learning. [Thesis, M.A. (Educational Technology)] Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Jan 2007.

Lee, Kwang Bok. The Design and Development of User Interfaces for Small Screen Computers. [Thesis, PhD] Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. June 2003.

Mendoza, Valerie Nicole Duran. Usability of Technology: The Causes and Levels of Frustration Over Time. [Thesis, M.Sc.] The University of Texas at El Paso. July 2005.

Morales-Morell, Anibal. Usability Aspects of A Location-Aware ToDo List Application. [Thesis, M.Sc. in Computer Engineering] University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez. 2000.

O'Dell, Toni. Generational Differences in Satisfaction with E-Learning in A Corporate-Learning Environment. [Dissertation, Doctor of Education] University of Houston. May 2009.

Pestina, Simona. Development Frameworks for Mobile/Wireless User Interface: A Comparative Study. [Thesis, Master of Computer Science] Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. March 2002.

Platt, Jeffrey Lynn. The Efficacy of An Electronic Performance Support System as a Training Tool for Online Faculty. [Dissertation, PhD] Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa. 2008.

Oct 20 (part 2): "Usability Evaluation" related Dissertations

Khartabil, Rana. User-Centered Design and Evaluation of a Dynamic Biochemical Pathway Visualization Tool. [Thesis ,Master in Computer Science] The University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. 2005.

Lee, Minseok. Usability of Collaboration Technologies. [Dissertation, PhD] Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. Aug 2007.

Li, Qian. Integrating Usability into Use Cases: A Methodology for User Interface Design. [Dissertation, PhD] The University of Connecticut. 2003.

Ling, Chen. Advances in Heuristic Usability Evaluation Method. [Dissertation, PhD] Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. Dec 2005.

Loser, Marilyn Maguire. Computer Conference Message Navigation, Structure and Organization: Usability Evaluation of A Spatial Interface. [Dissertation, PhD in Organizational Learning & Instructional Technology] The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico. July 2001.

Rihal, Saravjit Singh. Relationship between Certain Objective Performance Measures and Subjective Usability. [Dissertation, PhD] Texas A&M University. May 2001.

Roberts, Vera Louise. Methods for Inclusion: Employing Think Aloud Protocols in Software Usability Studies with Individuals who are Deaf. [Thesis, PhD] University of Toronto. 2004.

Somervell, Jacob. Developing Heuristic Evaluation Methods for Large Screen Information Exhibits Based on Critical Parameters. [Dissertation, PhD in Computer Science and Applications] Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. June 22, 2004.

Takeshita, Harumi. Usability Evaluation for Handheld Devices: Presenting Clinical Evidence at the Point of Care. [Thesis, Master of Applied Science] University of Toronto. 2003.

Yang, Lan. Pilot Usability Study of UI Prototype for Collaborative Adaptative Decision Support in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. [Thesis, M.A.Sc. (Electrical Engineering)] University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. 2005.

Oct 20....downloaded dissertations (part 2)

Aug 28 - Su, Usability Guidelines for Designing Mobile Learning Portals

Usability Guidelines for Designing Mobile Learning Portals.
Daniel Su Kuen Seong. The University of Nottingham, Malaysia. Jalan Broga, 43500 Semenyih, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia. +603-89248138 daniel.su@nottingham.edu.my

Mobility 06, Oct. 25–27, 2006, Bangkok, Thailand.
The 3rd International Conference on Mobile Technology, Applications and Systems — Mobility 2006.

Abstract
Mobile learning presumes the use of mobile Internet technology to facilitate the learning process. The growth and rapid evolution of the wireless technology have created new opportunities for anytime and anywhere learning paradigm. As a result, numerous mobile learning portals have been developed to gain the advantages of it. Nonetheless, there is little research and exploration has been initiated in proposing usability guidelines in designing mobile learning portals to achieve efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction of learning. Thus, this paper seeks to present usability guidelines by grounding the user interface on usability theoretical framework, possible constraints, and unique properties of mobile computing. Three categories of usability have been formulated: user analysis, interaction and interface design. Ten golden usability guidelines have been suggested which aims for designing highly efficacious, user friendly and usable mobile interface to support dynamicity of mobile and handheld devices. Moreover, Mobile Learning Course Manager (MLCM) portal has been developed to demonstrate and exemplify the usability guidelines proposed.

This integration of technologies has altered considerably the instructional strategies in our educational institutions and changed the way teachers teach and students learn [2]. ... Some noticeable examples with the use of technologies in educational context are multimedia learning, World Wide Web or web/Internet-based learning, e-Learning, and in recent years, the mobile learning.

Mobile learning has been perceived by many educationalists to offer flexibility in learning and
present a multitude yet unique educational advantages [5]. The rapid evolving of the wireless communication and demanding for the low-cost of mobile devices potentially direct many researchers and educationalists to move from web-based and e-Learning to mobile learning which promising easy and convenient ways of learning.
One distinct feature of mobile learning over e-Learning is mobility [6]. Hence, researchers and scholars are becoming enthusiastically in coining the term ‘mobile learning or m-learning’, such as ‘mobile learning as the point at which mobile computing and e-Learning intersect to produce an anytime, anywhere learning experience [7].
According to Nyiri [8], m-learning is fundamentally e-Learning delivered through mobile computational devices such as Palms, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA), Pocket PCs, smart phone, digital cell phones, and any other handheld devices. The use of mobile devices with the wireless network technology flourishes mobile learners to get convenience, expediency and immediacy of mobile learning in appropriate time and accessing the appropriate learning contents [7].
Additionally, mobile learning is the next generation of e-Learning and important instrument for lifelong learning [49].


The term usability is defined as by The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) ISO 9241-11 [16] as ‘the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.’
According to Nielsen [17], usability means the measure of the quality the users’ experience when interacting interface.
...usability is not a surface gloss which applied at the last minutes or before the releases of the system or product; but it is deeply affected by every stage of the analysis, design, and development [18].
Usable systems are easy to learn (learnability), efficient to use (efficiency), easy to remember (memorability), not error-prone (errors), and satisfactory in use (subjective satisfaction) [17].
The ultimate goal of usability is meeting the needs of to users’ satisfaction [17].
..advantages of usability encompass increased productivity, enhanced quality of work, improved user satisfaction, and reductions in support and training costs [19]. The reduction in costs has attracted many project managers and interface designers to employ the theory of usability when designing the interfaces as reported in [20, 21].


Mobile learning appears in any facets of possible variations in context such as locations, environment, conditions, noisy or quiet, weather and so on. Hence, the dynamicity has triggered
additional efforts and investigation in order to design highly usable mobile learning portals to cater for different types of users in the global economy.
Furthermore, the limitation of screen size, the presentation of mobile contents, and adaptation of the information to the sensitivity of context and devices influence the efficiency and effectiveness when learning via the mobile devices.
Hayhoe [23] emphasises that the design criterion of this ubiquitous perspective need to be examined thoroughly and focused as to eliminate boredom and disorientation which involves wide range of users in having variety types of handheld devices.


It is perceptible that little research and exploration has been initiated to propose usability
guidelines in designing mobile learning portals. Moreover, several extensive experiments conducted from 2002 to 2005 discover substantial amount of severe usability problems
pertinent to user behaviour in mobile navigation on mobile Internet portals’ design [24]. Therefore, this has set the directions for this paper to explore the usable guidelines when
designing mobile learning portals by grounding the user interface on usability theoretical framework, possible constraints, and unique properties of mobile computing.

Category Usability Guideline
User Analysis U1
Interaction U2, U3, U4, U5 and U6
Interface design U7, U8, U9 and U10
The usability guidelines are divided into three categories: user analysis, interaction, and interface design.

Guidelines mean ‘rules or principles for action, encapsulating some combination of practitioner determined best practices in a domain and research-based insights into factors relevant in that
domain [25].’
The usability guidelines framework is grounded on the usability theoretical framework discussed in [17], constraints proposed by [22], and understanding of a number of unique properties that are intrinsic to mobile computing as highlighted in [52, 53, 54].

3.1.1 User Analysis
U1: The user/learner

3.1.2 Interaction
U2: Human-mobile interaction
U3: Map between mobile learning portals and the real world
U4: Help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors
U5: Visibility of the status
U6: Minimise human cognitive load

3.1.3 Mobile Learning Interface Design
U7: The small screen display
U8: Do not overuse
U9: Navigation
U10: Consistency.

My Comments: Majority of Seong's USABILITY GUIDELINES were taken from Nielsen's TEN HEURISTIC or TEN HEURISTIC PRINCIPLES. Nielsen's 10 were among my "36 USABILITY INSPECTION CRITERIA" for e-Learning Portals. Seong had also the smart thing; take the Usabilty Criteria from a very well-known source. Most researchers would use some, most or all of Nielsen's 10 usability criteria.


Principally MLCM portal’s user interfaces can be perceived usable as the mobile learners or users are considered the most important entity in our design. Much effort has been devoted in analysing and evaluating the mobile learners’ need and caters for beginner, fast acting for a more expert learner, provides efficacious support to the learners’ working needs and is pleasant to use.

CONCLUSIONS
Technological changes and evolution significantly amplifies the demands on the quality and usable user interface and offer the potential to further enhance the task, structure and functionality of mobile devices. The rapidly increased number of mobile learning portals has urged the usability issues to be more transparent when designing the learning portals. This paper contributes ten usability guidelines which envelop user analysis, interaction and user interfaces categories. These usability guidelines empower the effort in creating highly usable and impressive user interface which promote the users’ satisfaction and interactivity while learning via the mobile and handheld devices. In addition, the proposed usability guidelines intend to set as benchmark for interface designers to further evaluate the mobile user interfaces to conform to the attributes of usability when designing usable mobile learning portals. Additionally, MLCM has demonstrated and exemplified the use of usability guidelines proposed which aims to increase the users’ satisfaction especially dealing with the diversify and universal mobile learners who comes from different background, culture, race, educational level, learning cognitive and styles. The simplicity design and ease of use, consistency in navigation, structural metaphoric, and standardised iconic design have promote mobile users’ cognitive and learning styles in accessing and comprehending MLCM to maximise their learning experiences and increase their learning curve indirectly.


Future Directions
we suggest the following for future extensions:
• Examines the usability guidelines by conducting usabilitytesting/evaluation to measure and quantify the theory of usability such as learnability, memorability, efficiency, effectiveness, and subjective satisfaction. The expected results and outcomes are used to prioritise the importance and plot the ranking of it.
• Further evaluation and experiment will be conducted to assess and determine whether the usability guidelines proposed are appropriate and met the basis of formal instructional design strategies, and the mobile curriculum development.
• Enhances the learning portals by extracting the lecture notes and other relevant digital documents, and transmit them to the respective mobile learners.

My Comments: In my Masters research, I measured the relative importance of all the 36 USABILITY INSPECTION CRITERIA (Seong called them Usability Guideline) and ranked them according to the rating of importance. I hope to repeat this for a larger set (36 plus More) of usability criteria for mobile learning.

References that I may want to read further in future:
[16] ISO/IEC, 9241-11 Ergonomic Requirements for Office Work with Visual Display Terminals (VDT)s – Part 11 Guidance on Usability. 1998: ISO/IEC 9241-11: 1998 (E).
[18] Lee, K. B., and Grice, R. A. Developing a New Usability Testing Method for Mobile Devices. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference (IPCCC’04). 14-17 April 2004, Phoenix, Arizona, 115-127.
[19] ISO/IEC, 13407. Human-Centred Design Processes for Interactive Systems. 1999: ISO/IEC 13407: 1999(E).
[22] Mayhew, D. J. The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner’s Handbooks for User Interface Design. Morgan Kaufman Publisher, 1999.
[23] Hayhoe, G. F. From desktop to palmtop: Creating usable online documents for wireless and handheld devices. In Proceedings of the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference. Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, 24-27 October 2001.
[24] Kaikkonen, A. Usability problems in today’s mobile Internet portals. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEE International Conference on Mobile Technology, Applications and Systems. 15-17 November 2005, Guangzhou, Chine, 459-464.
[25] Vavoula, G. N., Lefrere, P., O’Malley, C., Sharples, M., and Taylor, J. Producing Guidelines for learning, teaching and tutoring in a mobile environment. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE’ 04). 23-25 March 2004, Jhongli, Taiwan, ROC, 173-176.
[30] Su, D. K. S. A comparative evaluation and correlation between learning styles and academic achievement on e-Learning. In Kwan, R., and Fong, J. (Eds.), Proceedings of Web-based Learning: Technology and Pedagogy at The 4th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL’05). 31 July-3 August 2005, Hong Kong, China, World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 193-202
[39] Kaikkonen, A., and Laarni, J. Designing for small display screens. In Proceedings of the 2nd Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Aarhus, Denmark, New York: ACM Press, 19-23 October, 2002, 227- 230.
[42] Su, D. K. S., and Chan, F. C. Navigational patterns on usable mobile news portals. Journal of Internet Technology, 7(3), April 2006, forthcoming.