Social science research contains a wealth of knowledge for people seeking to understand collaboration processes. The authors argue that public managers should look inside the “black box” of collaboration processes. Inside, they will find a complex construct of five variable dimensions: governance, administration, organizational autonomy, mutuality, and norms. Public managers must know these five dimensions and manage them intentionally in order to collaborate effectively.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4096567.pdf

Collaboration Processes: Inside the Black Box

How to measure usability is an important question in HCI research and user interface evaluation. We review current practice in measuring usability by categorizing and discussing usability measures from 180 studies published in core HCI journals and proceedings. The discussion distinguish several problems with the measures, including whether they actually measure usability, if they cover usability broadly, how they are reasoned about, and if they meet recommendations on how to measure usability. In many studies, the choice of and reasoning about usability measures fall short of a valid and reliable account of usability as quality-in-use of the user interface being studied. Based on the review, we discuss challenges for studies of usability and for research into how to measure usability. The challenges are to distinguish and empirically compare subjective and objective measures of usability; to focus on developing and employing measures of learning and retention; to study long-term use and usability; to extend measures of satisfaction beyond post-use questionnaires; to validate and standardize the host of subjective satisfaction questionnaires used; to study correlations between usability measures as a means for validation; and to use both micro and macro tasks and corresponding measures of usability. In conclusion, we argue that increased attention to the problems identified and challenges discussed may strengthen studies of usability and usability research.

/pdf/current-practice-in-measuring-usability-challenges-to-2gr7rskqvi.pdf

Current practice in measuring usability: Challenges to usability studies and research

Although information visualization (infovis) technologies have proven indispensable tools for making sense of complex data, wide-spread deployment has yet to take hold, as successful infovis applications are often difficult to author and require domain-specific customization. To address these issues, we have created prefuse, a software framework for creating dynamic visualizations of both structured and unstructured data. prefuse provides theoretically-motivated abstractions for the design of a wide range of visualization applications, enabling programmers to string together desired components quickly to create and customize working visualizations. To evaluate prefuse we have built both existing and novel visualizations testing the toolkit's flexibility and performance, and have run usability studies and usage surveys finding that programmers find the toolkit usable and effective.

/pdf/prefuse-a-toolkit-for-interactive-information-visualization-1k95wewczb.pdf

prefuse: a toolkit for interactive information visualization

Most information retrieval technologies are designed to facilitate information discovery. However, much knowledge work involves finding and re-using previously seen information. We describe the design and evaluation of a system, called Stuff I've Seen (SIS), that facilitates information re-use. This is accomplished in two ways. First, the system provides a unified index of information that a person has seen, whether it was seen as email, web page, document, appointment, etc. Second, because the information has been seen before, rich contextual cues can be used in the search interface. The system has been used internally by more than 230 employees. We report on both qualitative and quantitative aspects of system use. Initial findings show that time and people are important retrieval cues. Users find information more easily using SIS, and use other search tools less frequently after installation.

/pdf/stuff-i-ve-seen-a-system-for-personal-information-retrieval-135afh3j94.pdf

Stuff I've Seen: A System for Personal Information Retrieval and Re-Use

In this study 2,684 people evaluated the credibility of two live Web sites on a similar topic (such as health sites). We gathered the comments people wrote about each siteis credibility and analyzed the comments to find out what features of a Web site get noticed when people evaluate credibility. We found that the idesign looki of the site was mentioned most frequently, being present in 46.1% of the comments. Next most common were comments about information structure and information focus. In this paper we share sample participant comments in the top 18 areas that people noticed when evaluating Web site credibility. We discuss reasons for the prominence of design look, point out how future studies can build on what we have learned in this new line of research, and outline six design implications for human-computer interaction professionals.

How do users evaluate the credibility of Web sites?: a study with over 2,500 participants

This paper provides an empirical characterization of user actions at the web browser. The study is based on an analysis of 4 months of logged client-side data that describes user actions with recent versions of Netscape Navigator. In particular, the logged data allow us to determine the title, URL and time of each page visit, how often they visited each page, how long they spent at each page, the growth and content of bookmark collections, as well as a variety of other aspects of user interaction with the web. The results update and extend prior empirical characterizations of web use. Among the results we show that web page revisitation is a much more prevalent activity than previously reported (approximately 81% of pages have been previously visited by the user), that most pages are visited for a surprisingly short period of time, that users maintain large (and possibly overwhelming) bookmark collections, and that there is a marked lack of commonality in the pages visited by different users. These results have implications for a wide range of web-based tools including the interface features provided by web browsers, the design of caching proxy servers, and the design of efficient web sites.

/pdf/what-do-web-users-do-an-empirical-analysis-of-web-use-1wuspr6rcn.pdf

What do web users do? An empirical analysis of web use

User interfaces can improve task performance by exploiting the powerful human capabilities for spatial cognition. This opportunity has been demonstrated by many prior experiments. It is tempting to believe that providing greater spatial flexibility-by moving from flat 2D to 3D user interfaces-will further enhance user performance. This paper describes an experiment that investigates the effectiveness of spatial memory in real-world physical models and in equivalent computer-based virtual systems. The different models vary the user's freedom to use depth and perspective in spatial arrangements of images representing web pages. Results show that the subjects' performance deteriorated in both the physical and virtual systems as their freedom to locate items in the third dimension increased. Subjective measures reinforce the performance measures, indicating that users found interfaces with higher dimensions more 'cluttered' and less efficient

/pdf/evaluating-the-effectiveness-of-spatial-memory-in-2d-and-3d-2lj75us918.pdf

Evaluating the effectiveness of spatial memory in 2D and 3D physical and virtual environments

Several recent research systems have provided interactive three-dimensional (3D) visualisations for supporting everyday work such as file and document management. But what improvements do these 3D interfaces offer over their traditional 2D counterparts? This paper describes the comparative evaluation of two document management systems that differ only in the number of dimensions used for displaying and interacting with the data. The 3D system is heavily based on Robertson et al.'s Data Mountain, which supports users in storing, organising and retrieving “thumbnail” representations of documents such as bookmarked Web-pages. Results show that our subjects were faster at storing and retrieving pages in the display when using the 2D interface, but not significantly so. As expected, retrieval times significantly increased as the number of thumbnails increased. Despite the lack of significant differences between the 2D and 3D interfaces, subjective assessments showed a significant preference for the 3D interface.

/pdf/3d-or-not-3d-evaluating-the-effect-of-the-third-dimension-in-5bg5kb16pf.pdf

3D or not 3D?: evaluating the effect of the third dimension in a document management system

Current commercial web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer provide a wide and diverse range of utilities, such as history lists and bookmarks, that support revisiting previously seen pages on the web. Yet previous research indicates that these utilities are largely unused. In this paper, we present an alternative utility called WebView; a prototype designed to improve the efficiency and usability of page revisitation. It does this by paying particular attention to how previous pages are represented visually, and by integrating many revisitation capabilities into a single display space. Our preliminary evaluation of WebView indicates that users are enthusiastic about the functionality provided, and that it improves the efficiency of some navigational acts.

http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/grouplab/uploads/Publications/Publications/1999-WebView.Ozchi.pdf

WebView: A Graphical Aid for Revisiting Web Pages

There is a surprising lack of empirical research into user interaction with the web. This paper reports the results of an analysis of four months of logged data describing web use. The results update and extend earlier studies carried out in 1994 and 1995. We found that web page revisitation is a much more prevalent activity than previously reported (approximately 80% of pages have been previously visited by the user), that most pages are visited for a surprisingly short period of time, and that users maintain large (and possibly overwhelming) bookmark collections.

/pdf/an-empirical-analysis-of-web-page-revisitation-4pac46zrge.pdf

Bruce McKenzie

Papers

What do web users do? An empirical analysis of web use

Evaluating the effectiveness of spatial memory in 2D and 3D physical and virtual environments

3D or not 3D?: evaluating the effect of the third dimension in a document management system

WebView: A Graphical Aid for Revisiting Web Pages

An empirical analysis of web page revisitation