Search results

(1 - 2 of 2)
TOWARD THE DEVELOPMENT OF USABILITY GUIDELINES FOR SINGLE-WINDOW WEB INTERFACES
Title
TOWARD THE DEVELOPMENT OF USABILITY GUIDELINES FOR SINGLE-WINDOW WEB INTERFACES
Creator
Maciukenas, James
Date
2013, 2013-05
Description
Since the early 1990s, usability research has guided development of web interfaces used to interact with content available on the Internet....
Show moreSince the early 1990s, usability research has guided development of web interfaces used to interact with content available on the Internet. Following these guidelines has resulted in web pages that in many characteristics are quite similar and are identified here as Conventional Web Interfaces (CWIs). An emergent genre of web interface, the Single Window Interface (SWI), differs in many ways from CWIs. Most importantly, SWIs differ from CWIs in the type of tasks expected of their users and in the visual strategies used to facilitate these tasks. Namely, SWIs facilitate open-ended discovery tasks by using strong visual cues to convey meta-information to the user and encourage both the exploration and perusal of content. This dissertation will demonstrate that the differences between SWIs and CWIs require revisiting current usability guidelines in order to determine how to guide future development of SWIs. If SWI visual strategies can be shown to be effective in conveying meta-information qualities to users, the groundwork will be prepared for future research investigating the effectiveness of these strategies in facilitating open-ended exploration and discovery within SWIs. These efforts will lead to more useful experiences for users of SWIs and inform the fields of technical communication as well as human-computer interaction and usability research, to name just a few of the affected fields of study.
PH.D in Technical Communication, May 2013
Show less
Ethics in the Details : Communicating Engineering Ethics via Micro-Insertion
Title
Ethics in the Details : Communicating Engineering Ethics via Micro-Insertion
Creator
Davis, Michael, Riley, Kathryn, Cox, Apryl, Maciukenas, James
Date
2009, 2009
Publisher
IEEE
Description
Work is described on a National Science Foundation grant that supports the development, assessment, and dissemination of “micro-insertion”...
Show moreWork is described on a National Science Foundation grant that supports the development, assessment, and dissemination of “micro-insertion” problems designed to integrate ethics into the graduate engineering curriculum. In contrast to traditional modular approaches to ethics pedagogy, micro-insertions introduce ethical issues by means of a “low-dose” approach. Following a description of the micro-insertion approach, we outline the workshop structure being used to teach engineering faculty and graduate students how to write micro-insertions for graduate engineering courses, with particular attention to how the grant develops engineering students’ (and faculty members’) ability to communicate across disciplinary boundaries. We also describe previous and planned methods for assessing the effectiveness of micro-insertions. Finally, we explain the role that technical communication faculty and graduate students are playing as part of the grant team, specifically in developing an Ethics In-Basket that will disseminate micro-insertions developed during the grant.
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications Vol. 52, Issue 1, pp. 95-108.
Show less