Assessing the memorability and usability of the Gutenberg Editor Interface in the Drupal CMS

The System Usability Scale (SuS) survey is a widely respected tool for measuring usability. Generally, a SuS score is administered directly after a usability test to assess the usability and user experience of digital products. However, some researchers have used SuS as a survey as part of longitudinal ‘in the wild’ trials where SuS is often completed some period after the trial. The aim of this research was to determine if a participant’s memory of a product’s usability would change if a SuS survey was administered at different times after a test. Hence, we sought to understand if recalling the usability of a digital technology was affected by temporal bias or memory decay. This paper includes results and findings from two studies, study 1 involved evaluating a web application and study 2 involved evaluating a virtual learning environment. Collectively the two studies had 212 participants (n = 212). The findings conclude that there is no significant change of the user’s recollection of the usability of digital product as evidenced by an analysis of users who completed multiple SuS surveys over a short term period of 3 weeks or over an extended period of time of 6 months. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS The system usability scale is used to test for memory decay and temporal bias in judging the user experience of technologies at different time points. 212 participants took part in two studies ranging from 3 weeks to 6 months. There is no evidence that there is a temporal bias or memory decay when users complete a SuS survey at the two different time points of 3 weeks and 6 months.

This study analyzed patient engagement with a virtual patient navigation platform (VPNP) designed to help guide bariatric surgery candidates through the complex pre-operative workup for surgery. Data on baseline sociodemographic and medical history was collected on patients enrolled in the bariatric program at a single academic institution between March and May 2021. The System Usability Scale (SUS) survey was administered to assess VPNP usability. Two groups emerged: "engaged" (ENG; n = 30) who activated their accounts and completed the SUS, and "not-engaged" (NEG; n = 35) who did not activate their accounts (n = 13) or did not use the app (n = 22) and were therefore ineligible for the SUS survey. Analyses demonstrated that only insurance status differed between groups (private insurance: 60% versus 34.3% for ENG versus NEG, respectively; p = 0.038). SUS survey analysis demonstrated high perceived usability (median score = 86.3), corresponding to the 97th percentile of usability. The top three reasons for disengagement included being too busy (22.9%), not being interested (20%), and being unsure about the purpose of the app (20%). The VPNP scored in the 97th percentile of usability. However, given a majority of patients did not engage with the app, and engagement was associated with completing pre-surgery requirements faster (unpublished), future work will focus on mitigating identified reasons for patients not engaging.

Is addressing the needs of its membership an easy task for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine?

Using podcasts to support communication skills development: A case study for content format preferences among postgraduate research students

Rhetorical theorist Sonja Foss introduced a theory of visual rhetoric in 1971 (Foss,2004). Aligning Applied Human Factors Engineering (AHFE) with visual rhetoric can provide the field of UX with a deeper understanding of how a design can impact the effective performance and usability of products. According to Foss, visual objects are not inherently rhetorical, but when they are organized to express symbolic action, allow for human intervention, and target a specific audience, these visual systems gain rhetorical significance (Foss, 2004). All the various user interfaces (UI) that humans interact with day to day include attempts by a user experience (UX) designer to "guide" the user to the proven, most effective, lowest-risk means of accomplishing a specific goal. Aligning user experience (UX) with the principles of rhetorical theory establishes an important facet through which the designer can understand why a UI design fails or succeeds. Aristotle taught that the speaker accomplishes persuasion accomplished by appealing to the three pillars of rhetoric: logos (appealing to logic), pathos (appealing to emotions), and ethos (appealing from authority).Similarly, Don Norman stated (2013), "Cognition provides understanding, and emotion provides value judgement." Norman also discussed (2003) that trust in the UI is damaged when UI doesn't meet these cognitive and emotional expectations. Consider an experience many Americans have in common, staying overnight in a hotel. Every hotel works similarly, understood through the hotel business's well-established practices and expectations built on previous experiences. But imagine what transpires when the experience breaks convention and the unexpected happens. Incorporating rhetorical principles in design considers how users identify and communicate to others in their user group. Appealing to the users through logos, pathos, and ethos helps the designer communicate more effectively, meeting the user's needs. When these pillars work together to communicate with the user more accurately, it improves a user’s discoverability of product features, and system affordances become a pleasant, straightforward experience to enhance the usability of products. High-usability products correlate to reduced cognitive load, task time reduction, and reduced fatigue time. Foss et., Helmers, Marguerite H., and Charles A. Hill. Defining Visual Rhetorics. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. Web.Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. Revised and expanded edition. New York, New York: Basic Books, 2013. Print.

It has been widely reported that interactions with and expectations of technology differ across cultural contexts. Concepts such as ‘usability’ have shown to be context-dependent, thus user interfaces intuitive to one group of users appears counter-intuitive to the others. In an attempt to localise a user interface of a tablet based system aimed at preserving Indigenous Knowledge for rural Herero communities, we present findings from two sites in Namibia, complementing prior research. Participants who had little or no previous experience with technologies informed our endeavour of aligning local indigenous knowledge practices with digital object taxonomies. We present a method (picture card sorting) of discovering taxonomies that influence the users' interaction with a prototype system to preserve indigenous knowledge. Finally we describe the design implications, a new design approach based on findings and present preliminary evaluations in a collaboration village as well as design export results with another indigenous group.

The Nintendo Switch is a popular hybrid portable gaming console that employs a novel modular design, enabling it to be played in multiple controller configurations: Handheld mode, left and right JoyCon Sticks, and the JoyCon Grip. However, there are notes of user complaints about the complexity of performing basic tasks as a result of the unintuitiveness of its user interface. This can result to poor gaming experience and may potentially affect customer buying decisions. To assess the affordance of the user interface design of the Nintendo Switch, a total of 16 Filipino participants, classified as either novice or expert users, based on familiarity with the Switch or other gaming consoles and their functionalities, were made to perform a predetermined set of tasks on navigating through the Nintendo Switch’s basic menus, and playing a racing game across different controller orientations. Affordance, overall usability, and gaming experience satisfaction were measured through 5-point Likert scales (5 being the highest) for affordance surveys, system usability scale (SUS) surveys, and in-task and post-task surveys, respectively. Separate sets of surveys were done for general navigation and gaming tasks. Additionally, quantitative measures of effectiveness (task completion success rates) and efficiency (time to successfully complete tasks) were taken for general navigation tasks, and compared between novice and expert users. Task efficiency rates were also compared to baseline values obtained from experienced Nintendo Switch users. Results show a significant difference between expert and novice users’ effectiveness rates, with expert users all successfully performing 73% of navigation tasks, compared to novice rates of 18%. Efficiency rates for both expert and novice participant groups consistently fell significantly behind baseline task completion times. Affordance survey results showed consistent ratings across different controller configurations for expert users, and high preference for JoyCon Grip and Handheld mode configurations for novice participants. Of all SUS scores, only Game Navigation for expert users scored above the 68-point threshold. Recommendations to improve the Nintendo Switch user interface affordance and overall user satisfaction were made.

Controlling assistive robots can be challenging for some users, especially those lacking relevant experience. Augmented Reality (AR) User Interfaces (UIs) have the potential to facilitate this task. Although extensive research regarding legged manipulators exists, comparatively little is on their UIs. Most existing UIs leverage traditional control interfaces such as joysticks, Hand-Held (HH) controllers and 2D UIs. These interfaces not only risk being unintuitive, thus discouraging interaction with the robot partner, but also draw the operator’s focus away from the task and towards the UI. This shift in attention raises additional safety concerns, particularly in potentially hazardous environments where legged manipulators are frequently deployed. Moreover, traditional interfaces limit the operators’ availability to use their hands for other tasks. Towards overcoming these limitations, in this article, we provide a user study comparing an AR Head-Mounted Display (HMD) UI we developed for controlling a legged manipulator against off-the-shelf control methods for such robots. This user study involved 27 participants and 135 trials, from which we gathered over 405 completed questionnaires. These trials involved multiple navigation and manipulation tasks with varying difficulty levels using a Boston Dynamics’s Spot, a 7 df Kinova robot arm and a Robotiq 2F-85 gripper that we integrated into a legged manipulator. We made the comparison between UIs across multiple dimensions relevant to a successful human–robot interaction. These dimensions include cognitive workload, technology acceptance, fluency, system usability, immersion and trust. Our study employed a factorial experimental design with participants undergoing five different conditions, generating longitudinal data. Due to potential unknown distributions and outliers in such data, using parametric methods for its analysis is questionable, and while non-parametric alternatives exist, they may lead to reduced statistical power. Therefore, to analyse the data that resulted from our experiment, we chose Bayesian data analysis as an effective alternative to address these limitations. Our results show that AR UIs can outpace HH-based control methods and reduce the cognitive requirements when designers include hands-free interactions and cognitive offloading principles into the UI. Furthermore, the use of the AR UI together with our cognitive offloading feature resulted in higher usability scores and significantly higher fluency and Technology Acceptance Model scores. Regarding immersion, our results revealed that the response values for the AR Immersion questionnaire associated with the AR UI are significantly higher than those associated with the HH UI, regardless of the main interaction method with the former, i.e., hand gestures or cognitive offloading. Derived from the participants’ qualitative answers, we believe this is due to a combination of factors, of which the most important is the free use of the hands when using the HMD, as well as the ability to see the real environment without the need to divert their attention to the UI. Regarding trust, our findings did not display discernible differences in reported trust scores across UI options. However, during the manipulation phase of our user study, where participants were given the choice to select their preferred UI, they consistently reported higher levels of trust compared to the navigation category. Moreover, there was a drastic change in the percentage of participants that selected the AR UI for completing this manipulation stage after incorporating the cognitive offloading feature. Thus, trust seems to have mediated the use and non-use of the UIs in a dimension different from the ones considered in our study, i.e., delegation and reliance. Therefore, our AR HMD UI for the control of legged manipulators was found to improve human–robot interaction across several relevant dimensions, underscoring the critical role of UI design in the effective and trustworthy utilisation of robotic systems.

A Summary of the Meetings of the Development of a Core Outcome Set for Therapeutic Studies in Eosinophilic Esophagitis (COREOS) International Multidisciplinary Consensus

This paper presents the results of a large-scale survey (n = 1092) that explored the attitudes and opinions of European Citizens regarding the adoption of socially assistive robots (SARs) for healthcare in the EU. We examined which functions citizens would support and which they consider a threat to trustworthy SARs. We additionally explored the relationships between the perceived vulnerability of the care recipient and acceptance, between attitudes towards robots and gender, age, religious beliefs, and previous experience interacting with SARs, and whether the degree of responsibility taken in performing a role affects acceptance. We also compared attitudes towards robots across European regions. The functions most negatively rated were triage and banning entrance. Privacy raised particular concern. We also found an inverse correlation between the perceived vulnerability of care recipients and acceptance. Additionally, we found a positive relationship between religious beliefs and fear of robots, a positive relationship between previous robot experience and attitudes towards them, and that females have less positive attitudes towards robots than males. Also, the degree of responsibility in a role determined acceptance. Involving citizens in the decisions concerning SARs deployment is important to build a society that people feel is fair in terms of robot coexistence. The results of the survey intend to provide evidence-based support to policies in this area.

Student preferences toward microcomputer user interfaces

Adx International is one of the international shipping services that has collaborated with various marketplaces. Along with the development of technology, Adx International chose a website as a promotional material as well as a system for the transaction process. This research will discuss problems with the UI/UX design of the website by distributing questionnaires to users. After that, several problems were found such as problems with navigation design (search filters), colors that are not aligned, excessive use of icons and there is no guidebook for using the Adx International website. Therefore, further user interface analysis is required. To evaluate the sustainability of this platform, a combination of Heuristic and System Usability Scale (SUS) methods are used in this research because the two methods have different but complementary focuses. Heuristic provides perspectives from experts or experts, while SUS provides perspectives from users. This research uses 10 heuristic aspects and 10 SUS questionnaire questions. The result of this study is to provide recommendations for improvement from both perspectives and identify aspects that need to be improved. The SUS score in this study for the Adx International website is 55. In addition, the results of this study present recommendations for design improvements from various aspects, therefore it can be concluded that this research is successful.

There have been many studies exposing poor usability of security software for the common end user. However, only a few inspect the usability challenges faced by more knowledgeable users. We conducted an experiment to empirically assess usability of the command line interface of OpenSSL, a well known and widely used cryptographic library. Based on the results, we try to propose specific improvements that would encourage more secure behavior. We observed 87 developers/administrators at two certificate-related tasks in a controlled environment. Furthermore, we collected participant opinions on both the tool interface and available documentation. Based on the overall results, we deem the OpenSSL usability insufficient according to both user opinions and standardized measures. Moreover, the perceived usability seems to be correlated with previous experience and used resources. There was a great disproportion between the participant views of a successful task accomplishment and the reality. A general dissatisfaction with both OpenSSL interface and its manual page was shared among the majority of the participants. As hinted by a participant, OpenSSL gradually “turned into a complicated set of sharp kitchen knives” – it can perform various jobs very well, but laymen risk stabbing themselves in the process. This highlights the necessity of a usable design even for tools targeted at experienced users (Supplementary material available at crocs.fi.muni.cz/papers/rsa2018).

Background and objective Rhinoplasty is a popular cosmetic procedure and it is influenced by various social, psychological, and medical factors. Understanding these motivations can aid healthcare providers in offering comprehensive care. In this study, we aimed to investigate the factors influencing the decision to undergo rhinoplasty, as well as previous experience and the factors that led to the decision to undergo the procedure in Saudi Arabia. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted by using an online questionnaire distributed through healthcare networksand social media platformsin Saudi Arabia The study included 717 adult participants. Data on sociodemographic characteristics, lifestyle factors, and motivations to undergo rhinoplasty were collected and analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 27.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY). Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to identify significant associations. Results The largest proportion of participants were from the Central Region (235, 32.8%); most were aged 26-35 years (183, 25.5%) and female (401, 55.9%). Social media, especially influencers, played a significant role in the decision to undergo rhinoplasty, with 193 (26.9%) agreeing that social media celebrities influenced them. Bullying (195, 27.2%), aesthetic standards (158, 22.0%), and self-confidence (196, 27.3%) were also key factors that played a role. Conclusions This study highlights that several factors, including social media, societal standards, and personal reasons like self-confidence and bullying, influence the decision to undergo rhinoplasty in Saudi Arabia. Regional and socioeconomic disparities further shape these decisions, with younger individuals and high-income groups showing a greater desire and propensity to undergo the procedure.

BackgroundResearch on patients' choice of hospital has focused on inpatients' rather than outpatients' choice of provider. We have investigated Danish outpatients' awareness and utilisation of freedom of choice of provider; which factors influence outpatients' choice of hospital, and how socio-demographic variables influence these factors in a single uptake area, where patients were free to choose any public hospital, where care was provided free at the point of delivery, and where distance to the closest hospitals were short by international standards.MethodsRetrospective questionnaire study of 4,232 outpatients referred to examination, treatment, or follow-up at one of nine somatic outpatient clinics in Roskilde County in two months of 2002, who had not been hospitalised within the latest 12 months. The patients were asked, whether they were aware of and utilised freedom of choice of hospital.ResultsFifty-four percent (2,272 patients) filled in and returned the questionnaire. Forty-one percent of respondents were aware of their right to choose, and 53% of those patients utilised their right to choose. Awareness of freedom of choice of provider was reported to be especially high in female outpatients, patients with longer education, salaried employees in the public sector, and in patients referred to surgical specialties. Female outpatients and students were especially likely to report that they utilised their right to choose the provider. Short distance was the most important reason for outpatients' choice, followed by the GP's recommendations, short waiting time, and the patient's previous experience with the hospital.ConclusionsOutpatients' awareness and utilisation of free choice of health care provider was low. Awareness of freedom of choice of provider differed significantly by specialty and patient's gender, education and employment. Female patients and students were especially likely to choose the clinic by themselves. Most outpatients chose the clinic closest to their home, the GP's recommendation and short waiting time being the second and third most important factors behind choice.