Computer Science

Abstract Two studies were designed to identify cross-cultural patterns of mobile phones usage and preferences for User Interfaces among Korean and British users.. The first study was a quantitative study (Questionnaires analysed by factor analysis), whose results demonstrated the two groups have different frustrations with and are satisfied by different aspects of mobile phone. The second study was a qualitative study (User Evaluation), which showed different values and focuses on different aspects of the User Interface.

Part of the challenge of designing systems to support knowledge work is to do so in a way which is sympathetic to users' uncertainty. NewsHarvester is a test-bed system designed to support news research and writing in a way that accommodates uncertainty in relation to information gathering. It does this using 'drag-and-link'; a simple feature by which text extracts copied from source locations are appended with hyperlinks to force the re-display of the source.

Abstract Information Visualisation (InfoVis) is defined as an interactive visual representation of abstract data. We view the user's interaction with InfoVis tools as an experience which is made up of a set of highly demanding cognitive activities. These activities assist users in making sense and gaining knowledge of the represented domain. Usability studies that involve a task-based analysis and usability questionnaires are not enough to capture such an experience.

Acquiring syntax appears to face the language learner with a “bootstrapping" problem. Acquiring syntactic rules presupposes that the syntactic categories in terms of which those rules are formulated have already been acquired; but syntactic categories only have meaning in virtue of the syntactic rules in which they figure. Learning syntactic categories and syntactic rules appear to be mutually interdependent.

Participants For any experiment, it is necessary to consider what the appropriate user population is. For example, if the experiment is designed to test the effect of a changed display structure for a specialist task, for instance, a new air traffic control system, it is important to recruit participants who are familiar with that task, namely experienced air traffic controllers. Similarly, if the concern is with an interface for older users, it is important to recruit such users to the study.

Abstract–The Alcor user interface to the Mizar library is intended to provide a test bed for exploring how a mathematician might interact with mathematical knowledge management tools. Specifically, how can a mathematician whilst working on or writing up mathematics look up relevant mathematical knowledge without interrupting their workflow? We describe how a specific interaction style has been used to implement keyword search and discuss how that style could benefit other more complex forms of context-specific searching.

ABSTRACT We have conducted a study of meetings to gain an understanding of how conversation is affected by computer use. We videotaped five workplace meetings, noting the disruptions that occurred, and recording people's disengagements when they performed tasks with paper or with laptops. We saw evidence that people preferred these disengagements not to exceed 10 seconds. When tasks were performed on laptops, disengagements were more likely to exceed this limit.

When designing complex systems, it is standard systems engineering practice to carefully design the interfaces between subsystems. Yet when designing human-computer systems, the interface between human and system is not usually thought through in such terms. Instead, the human is often given wide access to arbitrary parts of the system, and the result is a complex human-computer system that fails in various ways. We illustrate this argument with a case study of a public walk-up-anduse rail ticketing system.

Abstract Many mechanized reasoning systems have facilities for presenting formal content in a more human-oriented way, from outputting web pages to generating verbalisations of proofs. However, these are still some way from producing materials suitable for a mainstream mathematical audience. As an exploratory investigation into this mismatch, we have built a prototype digital library based on the Mizar Mathematical Library.

Abstract Immersion is recognised as an important element of good games. However, it is not always clear what is meant by immersion. Earlier work has identified possible barriers to immersion including a lack of coherence between different aspects of the game. Building on this work, we designed an experiment to examine people's expectations of how a game should behave and what would happen if that behaviour was deliberately made to be incoherent.

Abstract In the past, remote user testing has offered promising results when compared to its local counterpart. Nonetheless, the comparison studies conducted insofar have relied on small independent samples, measuring key metrics and have not focused on the qualitative objectives of user testing. The current study addresses these issues in order to reinforce the efficiency of the remote method in the key metrics but to also examine its ability to reveal qualitative data.

ABSTRACT Mobile phone ringtones help their owners identify their own phone ringing amongst the many other possible phones that could ring in a given place. However, existing interfaces for personalising ringtones have real usability problems. This paper proposes a new design that exploits humans' innate rhythmic abilities. The design is implemented in a PC prototype and compared to the existing interface of a popular brand of phone. It is found to be more satisfying and suggests further development.