User-centered design of graphical user interfaces

Evaluation of Premium Ultrasound Systems With Sonographers: How Comparative Usability Testing Can Reveal Human Factors Issues Prior to Errors in the Exam Room1

The role of commercial services within a military satellite communication system and their ability to support the communication requirements of the fixed and mobile military users has been the subject of considerable interest. Although commercial services are currently employed in the UK military communication systems, their implementation is typically restricted to the leasing of point to point circuits, on an as required basis. This paper considers the potential application of commercial satellite and terrestrial services for the next generation military communication systems. In considering the relative benefits of commercial satcom, it is important to assess not only the provision of in orbit transponders, but also the impact on ground management systems and user terminals, to support an integrated architecture.

The Android platform is designed to operate on a variety of different device types, screen sizes, and screen resolutions. To assist developers in meeting this challenge, Android provides a rich toolkit of user interface components to utilize and customize to the needs of their specific application. Android also relies very heavily on an extensible XML framework and set resource qualifiers to create liquid layouts that can adapt to these environmental changes. In this chapter, we take a look at some practical ways to shape this framework to fit your specific development needs.KeywordsJava CodeOutput AreaUser PressPublic ClassCustom WidgetThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The Android platform is designed to operate on a variety of device types, screen sizes, and screen resolutions. To assist developers in meeting this challenge, Android provides a rich toolkit of user interface (UI) components to utilize and customize to the needs of their specific applications. Android also relies very heavily on an extensible XML framework and set resource qualifiers to create liquid layouts that can adapt to these environmental changes. In this chapter, we take a look at some practical ways to shape this framework to fit your specific development needs.KeywordsContent ViewCustom ViewPublic ClassCustom ThemeWindow FeatureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Stimulated by regulations and standards as well as commercial imperatives, medical device manufacturers are striving to make medical devices safer by decreasing the potential for harmful use errors. Accordingly, manufacturers are observing and interviewing intended users about their interactions with devices en route to developing user interface requirements; applying human factors engineering (HFE) principles when designing user interfaces; and conducting formative and summative usability tests to improve and validate their devices’ interactive quality. This has represented significant work for manufacturers, particularly the majority who started with little HFE knowledge and experience. Today, the “awakening” to HFE in medical device development is essentially over—an established manufacturer who is just now discovering HFE has been out of touch. After all, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and AAMI conducted their first joint conference on HFE in 1995 when they previewed HFE expectations related to recent changes in quality system regulation (QSR). So, it has been 17 years since HFE entered the medical industry’s zeitgeist. HFE specialists working in the medical industry used to focus on making devices more usable (i.e., user friendly). Since the QSR change, use safety has become the primary focus, resulting in user interfaces that are less vulnerable to harmful use errors. It is rather obvious how HFE affects the safety of some medical devices. In the design of a surgical instrument, for example, HFE’s aim would be to reduce the chance of cutting anything other than the intended target. This goal could be accomplished by including a blade guard and a mechanical interlock that requires more than one deliberate action to enable cutting.

With the integration of information and communication systems into military operations, the issue of their cyber defense is becoming increasingly important. The main target for cyberattacks are databases that mostly contain confidential information. One of the most effective approaches to ensuring cybersecurity of databases of military information and communication systems is to use the intelligent capabilities of a SIEM system. SIEM allows real-time monitoring, analysis and response to potential cyber incidents. The article proposes a methodology for detecting cyber incidents by a SIEM system in databases of military information and communication systems. The main emphasis is placed on the multi-level protection of databases, which includes protection at the operating system level, the database level and the database management system, as well as the network level of protection. In order to improve the efficiency of cyber incident detection at the level of SIEM data analysis, an improved methodology based on fuzzy logic is used. Improvement of the methodology is achieved by introducing weights of antecedents in fuzzy rules, which allows, in some cases, to identify cyber incidents more accurately compared to existing models and methods. The weights of the antecedents of fuzzy rules are determined using the method of pairwise comparisons based on the rankings made on the 9-point Saaty scale. A decision-making algorithm for identifying cyber incidents based on the analysis of fuzzy rules and the weights of their antecedents is presented. An example of calculating the weights of antecedents of fuzzy rules using the method of pairwise comparisons based on rank estimates is given.

BackgroundTo address the epidemic burden of diet-related diseases, adequate dietary intake assessments are needed to determine the actual nutrition intake of a population. In this context, the eNutri web app has been developed, providing online automated personalized dietary advice, based on nutritional information recorded via an integrated and validated food frequency questionnaire (FFQ). Originally developed for a British population and their dietary habits, the eNutri tool has specifically been adapted to the German population, taking into account national eating habits and dietary recommendations.ObjectiveThe primary aim of this study is to evaluate the system usability and users’ experience and feedback on the eNutri app in a small-scale preliminary study. The secondary aim is to investigate the efficacy of personalized nutrition (PN) recommendations versus general dietary advice in altering eating habits.MethodsThe app was piloted for 4 weeks by 106 participants from across Germany divided into a PN group and a control group. The groups differed according to the degree of personalization of dietary recommendations obtained.ResultsAn overall System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 78.4 (SD 12.2) was yielded, indicating an above average user experience. Mean completion time of the FFQ was 26.7 minutes (SD 10.6 minutes). Across subgroups (age, sex, device screen sizes) no differences in SUS or completion time were found, indicating an equal performance for all users independent of the assigned experimental group. Participants’ feedback highlighted the need for more personalized dietary advice for controls, while personalized nutritional recommendations improved the awareness of healthy eating behavior. Further improvements to the eNutri app were suggested by the app users.ConclusionsIn total, the eNutri app has proven to be a suitable instrument to capture the dietary habits of a German population sample. Regarding functionality, system usability, and handling, direct user feedback was quite positive. Nutritional advice given was rated ambivalent, pointing to several weaknesses in the eNutri app, minimizing the system’s full potential. A higher level of personalization within nutritional advice subjectively improved the app’s usability. The insights gained will be used as a basis to further develop and improve this digital diet assessment tool.

Signal detection and identification are critical in today's shared wireless communication environments with diverse devices. These processes are fundamental to wireless, satellite, cognitive radio, and military communication systems. Automatic and real-time identification of radio traffic enables efficient utilization of resources, such as transmission bandwidth and power. It also facilitates dynamic spectrum access by identifying unused spectrum bands and maintaining fair coexistence among the communication devices. Furthermore, it contributes to spectrum surveillance by detecting unknown or unauthorized transmissions, and, hence, enhancing the Quality of Service (QoS) and network performance through effective noise and interference detection and mitigation. In this work, a Deep Learning (DL) approach is proposed for feature extraction and classification of received signals. In particular, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is employed to classify multiple modulation schemes in wireless fading channel conditions. Simulation results show that the CNN provides high classification accuracy, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed method in realistic wireless channels.

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.

The paper presents a new concept, Usability Monitoring, and applies it for situational awareness applications in military Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance systems (C4ISR). Usability Monitoring means taking measurements of technical Quality of Service (QoS) parameters in end systems and comparing them to target values of reference cases. The concept differs from QoS monitoring in the goal and in the placement of measurement points: In QoS monitoring the goal is to verify that the network provides the promised service quality in the user system - network interface. QoS monitoring does not capture the actual end user experience, which is influenced also by the end system, and therefore it does not directly correspond to the service quality that a user sees. Usability Monitoring has exactly this goal. The Observe-Orient-Decide-Act-Loop (OODA) is a decision making concept that is widely used in the network-centric approach and it emphasizes fast decision making. The presented model for Usability Monitoring is based on the OODA-loop. It includes QoS measurements not only in the Act-phase, i.e., can the user perform the actions s/he wants or are there delays and losses that make the system less usable, but also in the Observe-phase, i.e., does the user get the information s/he subscribes to, and in the Orient-phase, i.e., does the user get confusing information and cannot orient, and also the Decide-phase, i.e. is the user able to make right decisions based on the previous steps. The measured technical QoS parameters are connected to user experience by Mean of Score (MOS) functions that are obtained by usability tests. A case study for partially evaluating the Usability Monitoring concept is from MNE5 MSA (Multinational Experimentation 5, Maritime Situational Awareness) Experimentation Event 3 that was conducted in partnership with the Navy Command Finland, Naval Warfare Centre of Sweden and NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT) and the Singaporean Armed Forces (SAF) Future Systems Directorate. In the MNE5 MSA experimentation we were able to monitor end user experience, how the user sees the services and is able to work with the current tools and capabilities. In this article we describe how Usability Monitoring was addressed in the MNE5 MSA case study: meters for Usability Monitoring were selected and we investigated what aspects of usability affect the phases of the OODA-loop.

Cognitive accessibility aims to make content more accessible for people with cognitive impairments, such as the elderly and people with intellectual and learning disabilities. In this sense, it is possible to design an accessible user interface from a cognitive point of view. As a contribution, this article presents cognitive accessibility design patterns and their application in designing the Easier web system's user interface. The Easier web system provides a tool that assists in the understanding and readability of text content geared towards people with intellectual disabilities. It detects complex words and offers easier replacements and other resources such as a definition of the complex word. In addition to applying the design patterns, user tests with people with intellectual disabilities and older people have been carried out to evaluate the cognitive accessibility of the Easier system's interface. The results indicate that people with cognitive impairments know how to use the interfaces and have a satisfactory experience. In addition, a design proposal to provide a glossary mechanism to be used in web interfaces with simplified texts is presented and validated.

Creating a digital Manga comic for mobile devices is chalenging because of the limitation of device's screen size and time consuming of the process. In this paper, we proposed an efficient method for automatically creating mobile content of digital Manga comic from scanned of printed digital comic by extracting comic frame, comic balloon and Japanese character within a Manga comic then recompose it a new mobile content using ComicXML to store comic frame content information. Experimental results on Manga content extraction have 81.6% accuracy of non-flat comic page frame extraction, 100% accuracy of comic balloon detection, and about 93.75% accuracy of Japanese character text extraction.

The HF long range tactical communication systems currently in use by the Australian Defence Force (ADF) are outdated, inefficient, inflexible, expensive to maintain and operate, and incapable of carrying military traffic of the type and volume envisaged to support command and control in the 21st. century. The ADF's proposed military high frequency communication system (MHFCS) will be the first digital HF communications network of its size in Australia. With its singular features the system design brings with it a number of unique challenges. The overall dimensioning of the system, the need to resort to computer modelling to predict its performance, and the potential for congestion resulting from the requirement for automated connectivity are some of the major issues that have had to be addressed in the design of such a communications network.

An optical brain-machine interface (O-BMI) system using calcium imaging has various advantages such as high resolution, a comprehensive view of large neural populations, abilities such as long-term stable recording, and applicability to freely behaving animals in neuroscience research. The present study developed an ergonomic user interface (UI) design, based on a use scenario for an O-BMI system that can be used for the acquisition and processing of calcium imaging in freely behaving rodents. The UI design was developed in three steps: (1) identification of design and function requirements of users, (2) establishment of a use scenario, and (3) development of a UI prototype. The UI design requirements were identified by a literature review, a benchmark of existing systems, and a focus group interview with five neuroscience researchers. Then, the use scenario was developed for tasks of data acquisition, feature extraction, and neural decoding for offline and online processing by considering the sequences of operations and needs of users. Lastly, a digital prototype incorporating an information architecture, graphic user interfaces, and simulated functions was fabricated. A usability test was conducted with five neuroscientists (work experience = 3.4 ± 1.1 years) and five ergonomic experts (work experience = 3.6 ± 2.7 years) to compare the digital prototypes with four existing systems (Miniscope, nVista, Mosaic, and Suite2p). The usability testing results showed that the ergonomic UI design was significantly preferred to the UI designs of the existing systems by reducing the task completion time by 10.1% to 70.2% on average, the scan path length by 14.4% to 88.7%, and perceived workload by 12.2% to 37.9%, increasing satisfaction by 11.3% to 74.3% in data acquisition and signal-extraction tasks. The present study demonstrates the significance of the user-centered design approach in the development of a system for neuroscience research. Further research is needed to validate the usability test results of the UI prototype as a corresponding real system is implemented.

The article presents the general provisions and essence of the approach to building a mathematical model of the functioning of an automated military radio communication system in the process of its protection against radio reconnaissance by radio exchange along rational routes. The main components of the mathematical model of the functioning of an automated military radio communication system in the process of its protection against radio reconnaissance by radio exchange along rational routes with low intelligence availability are considered. The general structure of a mathematical model of the functioning of an automated military radio communication system in the process of its protection against radio reconnaissance by radio exchange along rational routes is proposed. It is shown that in the basic modeling unit of the subprocess of determining the rational routes of radio exchange among the set of possible ones, an optimization problem is solved. The result of solving this optimization problem is presented in tabular form for convenience. The analytical expressions for the third-rank tensor of the intelligence accessibility of individual branches of the radio communication system structure are obtained.