Browsing by Author "Hix, Deborah"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 27
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    Building Bridges and Interfaces: Toward the Next Generation of UIMS
    Hartson, H. Rex; Hix, Deborah (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1987)
    User interface management systems (UIMS) have established themselves in both research and commercial arenas. We present several generations in UIMS evolution and discuss some problems of the early generations. In particular, we discuss the problems of a gap between methods used by behavioral scientists and computer scientists during the process of building interfaces. We present an empirical approach to begin bridging this gap and results of our preliminary observations: a human-computer interface development life cycle and recording techniques for interface development, as well as UIMS needed to support them. We conclude with future directions for the evolution of UIMS.
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    Developing Human-Computer Interface Models and Representation Techniques(Dialogue Management as an Integral Part of Software Engineering)
    Hartson, H. Rex; Hix, Deborah; Kraly, Thomas M. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1987)
    The Dialogue Management Project at Virginia Tech is studying the poorly understood problem of human-computer dialogue development. This problem often leads to low usability in human-computer dialogues. The Dialogue Management Project approaches solutions to low usability in interfaces by addressing human-computer dialogue development as an integral and equal part of the total system development process. This project consists of two rather distinct, but dependent, parts. One is development of concepts for dialogue management, and the other is implementation of a dialogue management system (DMS) to evaluate these concepts. The goal of this paper is to describe our approach to the development of two of these conceptual aspects and how we oriented those toward the needs of practical implementation. The two conceptual aspects are (a) a structural, descriptive model of human-computer interaction, and (b) Techniques for representing both the behavioral (end-user's) view and the constructional (developer's) view of dialogue. The approach to their development was a technology transfer process that was part of a two-year university/industry research liaison between the Dialogue Management Project and IBM Federal Systems Division (FSD), now called Systems Integration Division. Part of this liaison was aimed at moving our research ideas and results into a real-world dialogue development environment. Following presentation of the technical problems and solutions, the paper concludes with a discussion of results of our liaison and by raising and addressing some questions of mutual interest that arose during our cooperative interaction.
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    Development and Evaluation of a Model of Behavioral Representation Techniques
    Chase, Joseph D.; Schulman, Robert S.; Hartson, H. Rex; Hix, Deborah (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1993)
    A user-centered approach to interactive system development requires a way to represent the behavior of a user interacting with an interface. While a number of behavioral representation techniques exist, not all provide the capabilities necessary to support the interaction development process. Based on observations of existing representation techniques and comments from users of the User Action Notation (UAN), a user- and task-centered behavioral representation technique, we have developed a model of behavioral representation techniques. Our model is an epistemological framework for discussing, analyzing, extending, and comparing existing behavioral representation techniques, as well as being a springboard for developing and evaluating new techniques. We present the model and results of our evaluation demonstrating the model's reusability and utility within the context of behavioral representation techniques.
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    Development and Testing of an Evaluation Procedure for User InterfaceManagement (UIMS)
    Hix, Deborah; Tan, Kay C.; Schulman, Robert S. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1989)
    A user interface management system or UIMS is an interactive system for supporting the design, production, and execution of human-computer interfaces. This paper reports on the development and empirical testing of an evaluation procedure to produce quantifiable criteria for evaluating and comparing UIMS. The form-based evaluation procedure results in quantitative ratings along two dimensions: functionality and usability. Specification/implementation techniques used by a UIMS are also quantitatively rated. An empirical study has indicated that the procedure produces reliable, useful results.
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    Effect of Touch Screen Target Location on User Accuracy
    Leahy, Michael; Hix, Deborah (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1990)
    Users can be frustrated by touch screen applications that inaccurately record their touches. Enlarging touch sensitive regions can improve touch accuracy, but few specific quantitative guidelines are available. This paper reports on a controlled experiment that investigated the effect of target location and horizontal viewing location on user accuracy. Measurements showed that persons tended to touch below the target, with touch distance increasing as the target location moved down the screen. In addition, they tended to touch toward the sides of the screen. Using collected data for each of nine screen sectors, graphs were prepared that show the relationship between touch target size and expected accuracy. For example, a 36 mm-squared target in the top left sector would be expected to record accurately 99% of its touches. The empirically-derived, quantitative guidelines will help designers create screens that decrease user errors and frustrations.
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    The Effects of Text Drawing Styles, Background Textures, and Natural Lighting on Text Legibility in Outdoor Augmented Reality
    Gabbard, Joseph L.; Swan, J. Edward; Hix, Deborah (MIT Press, 2006-02-01)
    A challenge in presenting augmenting information in outdoor augmented reality (AR) settings lies in the broad range of uncontrollable environmental conditions that may be present, specifically large-scale fluctuations in natural lighting and wide variations in likely backgrounds or objects in the scene. In this paper, we motivate the need for research on the effects of text drawing styles, outdoor background textures, and natural lighting on user performance in outdoor AR. We present a pilot study and a follow-on user-based study that examined the effects on user performance of outdoor background textures, changing outdoor illuminance values, and text drawing styles in a text identification task using an optical, see-through AR system. We report significant effects for all these variables, and discuss user interface design guidelines and ideas for future work.
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    An Evaluation Procedure for Human-Computer Interface Development Tools
    Hix, Deborah; Tan, Kay C. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1988)
    Human-computer interface development tools--often called user interface management systems or UIMS--are interactive systems that support production and execution of the human-computer interface. Despite their proliferation, no method exists for their systematic evaluation or comparison. We have developed an evaluation procedure that uses a standardized technique to produce quantifiable criteria for evaluating and comparing human-computer interface development tools. The procedure produces ratings along two dimensions: functionality and usability. Specification/implementation techniques used by the tool are also quantitatively rated. An empirical study indicates that the procedure produces reliable results. The procedure is already being used in one commercial environment.
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    Formative Evaluation: Ensuring Usability in User Interfaces
    Hix, Deborah; Hartson, H. Rex (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1992)
    Ensuring usability has become a key goal of interactive system development, as developers have begun to realize that it matters little how effectively an interactive system can compute, if human users cannot communicate effectively with the system. In this paper we discuss what we have found to be two main types of formative user interface evaluation: analytic and empirical. Both these types occur as part of the development process. We do not attempt to survey all approaches to either of these types of formative evaluation, but rather to offer a sampling of some approaches that have been found (by us and by others) to be useful in ensuring usability. We give only an overview of analytic methods, and then focus on empirical methods. We conclude with some observations on future trends in user interface evaluation.
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    Human-Computer Interface Development: Concepts and Systems for its Management
    Hartson, H. Rex; Hix, Deborah (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1986)
    Human-computer interface management, from a computer science viewpoint, focuses on the process of developing quality human computer interfaces, including their representation, design, implementation, execution, evaluation, and maintenance. This survey presents important concepts of interface management: dialogue independence, structural modeling, specification, rapid prototyping, holistic software engineering, control structures, and support environments, including User Interface Management System Tools. Several systems for human-computer interface management are presented to illustrate these concepts.
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    The immune epitope database (IEDB) 3.0
    Vita, Randi; Overton, James A.; Greenbaum, Jason A.; Ponomarenko, Julia; Clark, Jason D.; Cantrell, Jason R.; Wheeler, Daniel K.; Gabbard, Joseph L.; Hix, Deborah; Sette, Alessandro; Peters, Bjoern (2015-01-28)
    The IEDB, www.iedb.org, contains information on immune epitopes-the molecular targets of adaptive immune responses-curated from the published literature and submitted by National Institutes of Health funded epitope discovery efforts. From 2004 to 2012 the IEDB curation of journal articles published since 1960 has caught up to the present day, with > 95% of relevant published literature manually curated amounting to more than 15 000 journal articles and more than 704 000 experiments to date. The revised curation target since 2012 has been to make recent research findings quickly available in the IEDB and thereby ensure that it continues to be an up-to-date resource. Having gathered a comprehensive dataset in the IEDB, a complete redesign of the query and reporting interface has been performed in the IEDB 3.0 release to improve how end users can access this information in an intuitive and biologically accurate manner. We here present this most recent release of the IEDB and describe the user testing procedures as well as the use of external ontologies that have enabled it.
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    Interactive Digital Video Authoring and Prototyping
    Fox, Edward A.; Hix, Deborah; Schwartz, Edward E.; Siochi, Antonio C.; Koushik, Prabhakar M.; Inman, Donald (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1990)
    This paper reports on a joint research project between Virginia Tech and the NCR Corporation on Digital Video Interaction (DVI) technology. In particular, it discusses:
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    An Interactive Environment for Dialogue Development: Its Design, Use and Evaluation
    Hix, Deborah; Hartson, H. Rex (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1985)
    The Author's Interactive Didogue Environment (AIDE) of the Dialogue Management System is an integrated set of direct manipulation tools used by a dialogue author to design and implement human-computer interfaces without writing source code. This paper presents the conceptua! dialogue transaction model upon which AIDE is based, describes AIDE, and illustrates how a dialope author develops an interface using AIDE. A preliminary empirical evaluation of the use of AIDE versus the use of a programming language to implement an interface shows very encouraging results.
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    Interactive Tools: Making UIMS Usable
    Ehrich, Roger W.; Hix, Deborah; Hartson, H. Rex (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1986)
    The earliest UIMS provided primarily run-time facilities for interface management and a set of programming tools for the development of application from the implementation requirements with which many tool designers have approached UIMS design, there are also methodological requirements that have been seriously neglected. One reason is that interface design methodology is poorly understood and rarely axiomatic. Nevertheless, it is important that we formulate methodological theories and provide UIMS with tools that support them. This paper proposes a storyboard metaphor for the conceptual design of human-computer interfaces.
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    Notational Techniques for Accommodating User Intention Shifts
    Siochi, Antonio C.; Hartson, H. Rex; Hix, Deborah (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1990)
    Good user interface designs allow for user intention shifts. The asynchronous nature of direct maniulation interfaces inherently demands consideration of user intention shifts during the performance of a task. Maintaining a focus on the primary function of a task while at the same time accommodating user intention shifts is difficult for interface designers when both these aspects are represented at the same design level. The User Action Notation (UAN), a technique for representing asynchronous interfaces, contains a mechanism for specifying points in a task where user intention shifts may occur. A complementary technique, Task Transition Diagrams (TTDs), is used to specify tasks that users can perform to interrupt their current task. The Task Transition Diagram is a notation that allows a designer to map out the set of tasks and intentions of users without having to be concerned with the minutiae of how a user accomplishes those tasks.
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    PATRIC, the bacterial bioinformatics database and analysis resource
    Wattam, Alice R.; Abraham, David; Dalay, Oral; Disz, Terry L.; Driscoll, Timothy; Gabbard, Joseph L.; Gillespie, Joseph J.; Gough, Roger; Hix, Deborah; Kenyon, Ronald W.; Machi, Dustin; Mao, Chunhong; Nordberg, Eric K.; Olson, Robert; Overbeek, Ross; Pusch, Gordon D.; Shukla, Maulik; Schulman, Julie; Stevens, Rick L.; Sullivan, Daniel E.; Vonstein, Veronika; Warren, Andrew S.; Will, Rebecca; Wilson, Meredith J. C.; Yoo, Hyunseung; Zhang, Chengdong; Zhang, Yan; Sobral, Bruno (2014-01)
    The Pathosystems Resource Integration Center (PATRIC) is the all-bacterial Bioinformatics Resource Center (BRC) (http://www.patricbrc.org). A joint effort by two of the original National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases-funded BRCs, PATRIC provides researchers with an online resource that stores and integrates a variety of data types [e. g. genomics, transcriptomics, protein-protein interactions (PPIs), three-dimensional protein structures and sequence typing data] and associated metadata. Datatypes are summarized for individual genomes and across taxonomic levels. All genomes in PATRIC, currently more than 10 000, are consistently annotated using RAST, the Rapid Annotations using Subsystems Technology. Summaries of different data types are also provided for individual genes, where comparisons of different annotations are available, and also include available transcriptomic data. PATRIC provides a variety of ways for researchers to find data of interest and a private workspace where they can store both genomic and gene associations, and their own private data. Both private and public data can be analyzed together using a suite of tools to perform comparative genomic or transcriptomic analysis. PATRIC also includes integrated information related to disease and PPIs. All the data and integrated analysis and visualization tools are freely available. This manuscript describes updates to the PATRIC since its initial report in the 2007 NAR Database Issue.
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    Procedure for Evaluating Human-Computer Interface Development Tools
    Hix, Deborah (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1990)
    Human-computer interface development tools are interactive systems that support production and execution of the human-computer interface. With their recent proliferation, evaluations and comparisons are constantly done, but without a formal, structured approach. Addressing these problems is difficult, largely because of the relative newness of such tools, because of the many different kinds of systems that are called UIMS, and because of their inherent complexity. These tools are complex because human-computer interfaces, which produce tools, are complex.
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    A Procedure for Evaluation Human-Computer Interface Development
    Hix, Deborah (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1989)
    An evaluation procedure that uses a standardized technique to produce quantifiable criteria for evaluating and comparing human-computer interface development tools is described in this paper. An empirical validation study to determine the consistency of ratings produced by this procedure is also presented. These ratings could be used, for example, as important data for the task of choosing a tool for a particular human-computer interface development environment.
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    Query Composition: Why Does It Have to Be So Hard?
    Nowell, Lucy Terry; Hix, Deborah; Labow, Eric D. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1993)
    Project Envision, a large research effort at Virginia Tech, focuses on developing a user centered multimedia database from the computer science literature with full-text searching and full-content retrieval capabilities. User interviews indicate that people have trouble composing queries. Widely available boolean retrieval systems present problems with both syntax and logic. Natural language queries for vector space retrieval systems are easier to compose but users complain that they do not understand the matching principles used; users also complain that they have too little control over the search and fear being overwhelmed by an enormous retrieval set. We describe the Envision query window which has as a usability goal making query composition easy while increasing user control. Results of formative usability evaluation and subsequent redesign are discussed.
  • Remote Usability Evaluation at a Glance
    Castillo, Jose C.; Hartson, H. Rex; Hix, Deborah (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1997-07-01)
    Much traditional user interface evaluation is conducted in usability laboratories, where a small number of selected users is directly observed by trained evaluators. However, as the network itself and the remote work setting have become intrinsic parts of usage patterns, evaluators often have limited access to representative users for usability evaluation in the laboratory and the users' work context is difficult or impossible to reproduce in a laboratory setting. These barriers to usability evaluation led to extending the concept of usability evaluation beyond the laboratory, typically using the network itself as a bridge to take interface evaluation to a broad range of users in their natural work settings.
  • Seeing Things Your Way: Information Visualization for a User-Centered Database of Computer Science Literature
    Nowell, Lucy Terry; Fox, Edward A.; Heath, Lenwood S.; Hix, Deborah; Wake, William C.; Labow, Eric D. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 1994)
    Project Envision is a user-centered multimedia database of computer science literature. Envision features powerful information visualization by displaying search results as a matrix of icons, with layout semantics under user control. Its Graphic View interacts with Item Summary and Preview Item windows to give users access to bibliographic information and abstracts. The concepts underlying these windows are being extended to a Graphical Browser for the full database and for hierarchical structures. This paper describes the development process and information visualization facilities in Envision search results and browsing displays.