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Projects -> Ocular Biometrics

 

Goal: Provide software engineers with a set of effort based objective metrics and measures to pinpoint usability issues early in the software development process. 

Motivation: Many software engineers consider usability testing as one of the more tedious and least satisfying tests to conduct.  A 2007 study of Swiss software engineers, found that 61.9% of the respondents did not conduct usability tests; even though 40% of the respondents view usability tests as useful. Ask almost any computer user what can software engineers do to make the software better, and the answer will be to make the software more “user-friendly”.  Like most broad-brush terms, “user-friendly” is a very ambiguous term.  One noted authority on software usability, Jacob Nielson, says that end-users really don’t want the computer to be their friend; they just don’t want them to be a barrier to accomplishing an objective.  Poor software usability cannot only cause barriers to accomplishing objectives it can cause deaths, as in the Therac-25 accident. Therefore the project concentrates on developing the metrics required for the multidimensional usability evaluation and the strategies allowing to address usability issues.

Project Status: Looking for students interested in the project. Please contact Dr. Komogortsev if interested in participation.

 

Publications:

C. Holland, O. V. Komogortsev, D. Tamir, Identifying Usability Issues via Algorithmic Detection of Excessive Visual Search, In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Austin, TX, 2012, pp. 1-10. [.pdf]

O. V. Komogortsev, C. Holland, D. Tamir, and C. Mueller, Aiding usability evaluation via detection of excessive visual search. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2011, pp. 1-6. [link]

O. V. Komogortsev, D. Tamir, C. Mueller, J. Camou, and C. Holland, EMA: Automated Eye-movement-driven Approach for Identification of Usability Issues, In Proceedings of the Human Computer Interaction International (HCII) Conference, Orlando, Florida, 2011, pp. 1-10. [link]

D. Tamir, O. V. Komogortsev, C. Mueller, D. Venkata, G. LaKomski, and A. Jamnagarwala, Detection of Software Usability Deficiencies, In Proceedings of the Human Computer Interaction International (HCII) Conference, Orlando, Florida, 2011, pp. 1-10. [link].

L. Feldman, C. Mueller, O. Komogortsev, and D. Tamir, Usability Testing with Total-Effort Metrics. In Proceedings of ACM Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) Lake Buena Vista, FL, 2009, pp. 426-429. [.pdf].

C. Mueller, D. Tamir, O. V. Komogortsev, and L. Feldman Using Designer's Effort for User Interface Evaluation. In Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics San Antonio, Texas, USA: IEEE, 2009, pp. 1-6. [.pdf].

Mueller, C., Tamir, D., Komogortsev, O., Feldman, L. An Economical Approach to Usability Testing. in Proceedings of the 33rd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2009), July 2009. [.pdf]

Komogortsev, O., Mueller, C., Tamir, D., Feldman, L. An Effort Based Model of Software Usability. in Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering Theory and Practice (SETP 2009), July 2009. [.pdf]

Tamir D., Komogortsev O. and Mueller C. An Effort and Time Based Measure of Usability. In Proceedings of the 6th international Workshop on Software Quality (WoSQ 2008), May 2008. pp. 1-6. [.pdf]

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