Despite intense and wide-spread research in both virtual environments (VEs) and usability, the exciting new technology of VEs has not yet been closely coupled with the important characteristic of usability -- a necessary coupling if VEs are to reach their full potential. Although numerous methods exist for usability evaluation of interactive computer applications, these methods have well-known limitations, especially for evaluating VEs. Thus, there is a great need to develop usability evaluation methods and criteria specifically for VEs. Our goal is to increase awareness of the need for usability engineering of VEs and to lay a scientific foundation for developing high-impact methods for usability engineering of VEs. The first step in our multi-year research plan has been accomplished, yielding a comprehensive multi-dimensional taxonomy of usability characteristics specifically for VEs. This taxonomy was developed by collecting and synthesizing information from literature, conferences, World Wide Web (WWW) searches, investigative research visits to top VE facilities, and interviews of VE researchers and developers. The taxonomy consists of four main areas of usability issues: Users and User Tasks in VEs, general user and task characteristics and types of tasks in VEs

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The goal of much work in virtual environments (VEs) to date has been to produce innovative visual, aural, and haptic technology; until recently, there has been very little user-centered, usability-focused research in VEs. However, there is beginning to be at least some awareness of the need for usability engineering within the VE community, mostly addressing particular parts of the VE usability space. This paper motivates the need for usability engineering methods specifically for VEs and describes a framework of usability characteristics for VEs. It gives a detailed example of use of the framework and supplemental VE usability resources in design and evaluation of a navigation metaphor for a real-world battlefield visualization VE application. Our goal is to increase awareness of the need for VE usability through this framework, which in turn will be used to produce usability engineering methods for development of VEs. KEYWORDS: Virtual environments, virtual reality, usability, usabil...

Since its founding, NASA has been dedicated to the advancement of aeronautics and space science. The NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Program Office plays a key part in helping NASA maintain this important role. The NASA STI Program Office is operated by Langley Research Center, the lead center for NASA’s scientific and technical information. The NASA STI Program Office provides access to the NASA STI Database, the largest collection of aeronautical and space science STI in the world. The Program Office is also NASA’s institutional mechanism for disseminating the results of its research and development activities. These results are published by

Eldergames is a EU-funded project to develop games using advanced visualisation and interaction interfaces to improve the cognitive, functional and social skills of older users. The project merges two major areas to which technology for elderly people is applied: health and social engagement. Its platform will allow users to improve their cognitive skills and individual well-being by playing on a mixed-reality platform; in addition, it will offer the unusual experience of communicating with people located in other countries without the need to share the same language. After introducing the field of gerontology and the project, this paper describes the main cognitive abilities that change with aging (perception, attention, memory, and other more specific processes such as decision-making), and that have to be taken into account while designing a technology for elderly people. Some guidelines that are specifically meant to ensure usability of these products are listed in the conclusions.

This chapter presents a characterization of methods that integrate human computer interaction (HCI) design with the earliest stages of the object-oriented software life cycle. This integration addresses a major cause of interactive system failure, namely the poor quality of user support that interactive systems often provide. Thus, the integration contributes to reliable and consistent design methods for effective and usable systems. Because the integrated methods combine object-oriented modeling with human-computer interaction design, the resulting methods are dubbed oohci methods. This chapter contains a motivation for the oohci approach, background material on human-computer interaction for object practitioners, and a description of activities and artifacts that can be adopted in oohci methods. The latter material provides a unified framework within which to view existing oohci methods and to guide further work in the field. 1

Metaphors and visual formalisms are commonly seen as two different and separate concepts for the design of human computer interfaces. This article describes both concepts and their advantages and disadvantages. We claim that thorough consideration of the use of these concepts enhances the design of human computer interfaces. We also claim that strict separation of these concepts is not always possible or useful. Practical examples are given to support our claims and to demonstrate the problems as well as the possibilities of metaphors and visual formalisms in interface design.

The effectiveness of an interactive system can be defined as the degree to which users can access and use the functionality of a system in meeting their task objectives (Nielsen, 1993). Such assessment is generally based on a multitude of measures. These measures involve determining if users can perform tasks supported by a system: (1) efficiently (i.e., the quantity of performance effectiveness); with (2) minimal errors (i.e., the quality of performance effectiveness); (3) minimal support (i.e., intuitiveness in terms of learnability); (4) maximal retention of commands over time (i.e., intuitiveness in terms of memorability); (5) appropriate task demands (i.e., positive subjective perception in terms of perceived mental workload); and (6) sufficient satisfaction (Eberts, 1994; Shneiderman, 1992). While there are advantages and disadvantages to these evaluative criteria, each provides valuable information in the assessment of system effectiveness and, in turn, human performance with a system, thus warranting the use of a combination of indicators. In addition, because of the conflicting nature of these criteria (e.g., task efficiency may need to be sacrificed in order to improve subjective satisfaction) it is not always possible to achieve optimal performance for all criteria (Nielsen, 1993). Subjective criteria (e.g., user satisfaction, mental workload) can be evaluated by expert evaluation, informal

India’s most valued and revered gift not only to Herself but also to the entire humanity is its profound and timeless heritage. It is for this reason the Indian heritage is to be properly grasped, understood, documented and apprehended and made accessible to widespread audience. However, this task is not easy. In Indian context, concept of heritage is explained in detail taking into account the broader vision of humanity. A fundamental problem associated with the new classes of visual data and their related analysis is that they focus, (despite their appearance) on abstract information, which does not automatically map onto the physical world. Thus, many interesting classes of visual information have no natural and obvious metaphorical representation. Once this is accepted, then it is necessary to visualize the complete picture of the heritage tree, that enables to express a logical flow of such tree with more authenticity, and in a metaphoric fashion to put it in digital form, with better human-computer interaction. In this research paper, effort is to bring the clarity in the structure of Indian Heritage to express it in the form of Visual Metaphor Model, while undertaking a work of creation of ‘digital library (DL) of Indian heritage’.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright 2006, ACM. Vol. 2, Issue 4, August 2007, pp. 190-210 This paper describes work on developing usable interfaces for creating and editing methods for highthroughput screening of chemical and biological compounds in the domain of life sciences automation. A modified approach to metaphor-based interface design was used as a framework for developing a screening method editor prototype analogous to the presentation of a recipe in a cookbook. The prototype was compared to an existing screening method editor application in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction of novice users and was found to be superior. Keywords Metaphor-based design, cognitive task analysis, usability evaluation, life sciences automation