Suchergebnisse

Government departments are increasingly transferring their services from office visits to digital online services. This is a global phenomenon called electronic government, or e-government. Transferring public services to the web brings the same challenges to the development and use of these services as all online services face: If your website is not able to please the customer in two seconds, they leave. It is inevitable that to success governments have to take an interest in customer behavior. Finnish Tax Administration (Verohallinto in Finnish) has developed an e-service, MyTax, where citizens and businesses can handle nearly all their tax issues at once. Tax Administration has understood that if the government wants people to pay their taxes, they should provide services which enable it as efficiently and easily as possible. This means providing services that have high usability. Usability should be continuously evaluated, and the system developed based on the perceptions from the usability evaluation. One of the usability evaluation methods is web analytics which is a way of learning how users interact with websites by automatically recording aspects of users' behavior and then combining and transforming the behavior into data that can be analyzed. This thesis inspected web analytics in usability evaluation in the context of MyTax. The aim of the study was to gain insight about aspects that either argue for or criticize the use of web analytics in usability evaluation. The aim was also to inspect what actions should be done after having the results from web analytics in order to improve usability. The study was conducted by scoping review method which is a research approach to review literature. The method was chosen because the goal was to summarize and disseminate research findings of this particular area of study. The purpose was to describe existing literature from web analytics in usability evaluation and reflect the findings with the practical context of My Tax. According to the scoping review results, web analytics can be utilized in every phase of the usability evaluation process and even in other parts of the development process. It can indicate possible usability problems, set priorities to usability testing, be combined to other user behavior data, and verify effectiveness of the design changes made. Web analytics can also offer facts to assist in decision-making and save design and usability testing costs. However, web analytics alone is not enough for usability evaluation as the analytics data does not give insight into why usability problems exist, and other evaluation methods should be used aside. As a result of this thesis, it was possible to give to MyTax development suggestions for possible metrics and KPIs to use when implementing web analytics. Furthermore, it was possible to list use cases where web analytics could be utilized. Privacy policy and GDPR issues to consider were also presented. Overall, the results of this thesis can be used when considering utilizing web analytics in usability evaluation especially in the special domain, e-government services. ; Julkishallinto on siirtämässä yhä enemmän palvelujaan toimistoista verkossa tarjottaviin palveluihin, e-palveluihin. Tätä voi kutsua kansainväliseksi e-hallinnon ilmiöksi. Julkishallinnon palveluiden siirtäminen verkkoon aiheuttaa samoja haasteita palvelukehitykselle kuin kaupallisissa palveluissa: Jos nettisivu ei miellytä asiakasta kahdessa sekunnissa, hän lähtee palvelusta. Julkishallinnon tulee olla kiinnostunut asiakkaiden käyttäytymisestä, mikäli palveluiden halutaan menestyvän. Verohallinto on kehittänyt e-palvelun, OmaVeron, jossa kansalaiset ja yritykset voivat hoitaa lähes kaikki veroasiansa kerralla. Verohallinto on ymmärtänyt, että saadakseen veronmaksajia tarjottavien palveluiden tulee olla helppokäyttöisiä ja tehokkaita. Tämä tarkoittaa, että palvelujen tulee olla käytettäviä. Käytettävyyttä tulisi arvioida jatkuvasti ja kehittää järjestelmää käytettävyyden arvioinnista nousseiden havaintojen perusteella. Yksi käytettävyyden arvioinnin menetelmistä on verkkoanalytiikka, jolla voidaan tehdä havaintoja käyttäjien vuorovaikutuksesta nettisivulla. Verkkoanalytiikka mittaa käyttäytymistä automaattisesti ja muuntaa sen dataksi, jota voidaan analysoida. Tässä pro gradu -tutkielmassa tutkittiin verkkoanalytiikan hyödyntämistä käytettävyyden arvioinnissa OmaVero-palvelun kontekstissa. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli selvittää eri näkökulmia, joko kriittisesti tai myönteisesti suhtautuvia, verkkoanalytiikan hyödyntämiselle käytettävyyden arvioinnissa. Tavoitteena oli myös selvittää, mitä toimenpiteitä tulisi suorittaa verkkoanalytiikasta saatujen tulosten jälkeen, jotta käytettävyyttä voidaan parantaa. Tutkimus toteutettiin kartoittavana katsauksena (scoping review), joka on tutkimusmenetelmänä eräs kirjallisuuskatsauksen osa-alue. Menetelmäksi valittiin juuri kartoittava katsaus, koska tavoitteena oli tiivistäen ja hajottaen tutkia aiheesta saatuja tutkimustuloksia. Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena oli kuvailla aiheesta olemassa olevaa kirjallisuutta ja reflektoida saatuja tuloksia OmaVeron kontekstiin. Tutkimustulosten perusteella verkkoanalytiikkaa voidaan hyödyntää jokaisessa käytettävyyden arvioinnin vaiheessa ja jopa muissa kehitysprosessin vaiheissa. Verkkoanalytiikka voi tunnistaa mahdollisia käytettävyysongelmia ja asettaa prioriteetteja käytettävyyden arvioinnille. Verkkoanalytiikkaa voidaan yhdistää muuhun käytettävyysdataan ja hyödyntää tehtyjen muutosten tehokkuuden arviointiin. Verkkoanalytiikka voi lisäksi tarjota faktoja päätöksenteon tueksi ja säästää suunnittelu- ja käytettävyystestien kustannuksissa. On kuitenkin huomioitava, että verkkoanalytiikka ei ole yksinään riittävä käytettävyyden arvioinnissa, sillä datan perusteella ei saada tietoa, miksi jokin käytettävyysongelma esiintyy. Siksi suositellaan käytettäväksi rinnalla muita käytettävyyden arvioinnin menetelmiä. Tutkielman perusteella OmaVeron tapaukseen voitiin antaa ehdotuksia sopivista mittareista, kun verkkoanalytiikkaa otetaan käyttöön. Lisäksi voitiin tarjota käyttötapauksia, joissa verkkoanalytiikkaa voi hyödyntää. Myös yksityisyyden suojan ja GDPR:n vaatimukset otettiin huomioon. Kokonaisuutena tämän tutkielman tuloksia voidaan hyödyntää, kun suunnitellaan verkkoanalytiikan hyödyntämistä käytettävyyden arvioinnissa erityisesti tutkielman erityisalueella eli julkishallinnon e-palveluissa.

Beitrag 5. Europäisches Symposium zur Verständlichkeit von Rechtsvorschriften des Bundesministeriums der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz: In der Informatik hat sich in den letzten drei Jahrzehnten eine neue Subdisziplin etabliert, die sich mit der Gebrauchstauglichkeit von Benutzeroberflächen beschäftigt: Usability Engineering bietet im Software-Entwicklungsprozess eine Reihe von Methoden und Tools an, um wesentliche Anforderungen zu klären, den Anwendern die Bedienung zu erleichtern, Fehleingaben zu verhindern und im Sinne verbesserter "User Experience" den Zugang zu Inhalten attraktiver zu gestalten. Viele dieser Methoden lassen sich auch für die Erstellung inhaltlich komplexer Fachtexte anwenden, und Technische Redakteure konnten bereits gute Erfahrungen damit machen. Diese Erfahrungen können – mutatis mutandis – auch für die Erstellung und Optimierung von Rechtstexten hilfreich sein, vom Planungsprozess für neue Gesetze bis hin zur Optimierung der Gestaltung von Massen-Bescheiden im Verwaltungsrecht. In diesem Beitrag werden einige dieser Prinzipien und Methoden vorgestellt, jeweils mit Anwendungsbeispielen für unterschiedliche Textsorten aus der Rechts- und Verwaltungssprache.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to focus upon some important prerequisites for a qualitative good life for people who are users of signalling devices, prerequisites that at the same time represent barriers for communication, mobility and partaking in ordinary activities. It is also to discuss usability and user satisfaction from a new angle by combining disability studies with STS‐perspectives (Science, Technology and Society) in order to grasp the connection between disability as a social phenomenon and technology as a social actor. The paper discusses reasons for abandonment of AT‐devices (assistive technology‐devices) and the shaping of action by technologies.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative approach is used by the way of semi‐structured interviews with users and public and private service providers in the Norwegian hearing aid market. A bottom‐up strategy is used for data collection. First, users of signaling devices were interviewed about their experiences on how to get and use devices. Then service providers were interviewed about important issues that users raised. A keyword analysis was used in order to highlight barriers for use in daily life. Users were recruited through their interest organization and at an AT exhibition. All the interviews were conducted at cafeterias or at work places.FindingsThe article points at lack of information at companies' websites, professional power, the construction of "end user", routines of everyday life, as well as the matching of devices to age, gender and lifestyle along with attitudes of family, friends and neighbours as important barriers. The article shows how cultural norms and values about gender and disability are inscribed into the technologies. The end product, the polar bear, the watch or the wireless alert system, can be described as a "script" that is supposed to help the individual to perform actions, but as shown – can also limit actions or relations.Research limitations/implicationsThe design of AT‐devices as pointed at in this article not only deals with utility and functionality, but also with usability and human communication. More research on usability is needed, as well as on the user‐expert relationship and how devices function in society as identity markers. In sum, more research on AT is needed in order to develop more knowledge on how to reduce individual risks and societal costs related to abandonment or non‐use.Practical implicationsAlthough changes are taking place in AT services today, the article shows that issues of usability such as the aesthetical side of design, identity and user satisfaction are important but neglected issues by service providers and producers.Social implicationsDespite the ongoing, but slow process from a patient‐oriented system to a more user‐ or customer‐oriented AT system still represents a challenge for services as well as for the welfare state.Originality/valueThe article combines STS‐perspectives, disability studies perspectives and Silverstone's integrative framework on how to get and integrate mainstream ICT‐objects in private households, in order to discuss reasons for abandonment of AT‐devices for people who are hard of hearing. The approach highlights what is special with the integration of AT devices into private homes, as compared to mainstream ICT‐objects, and important reasons for abandonment are discussed that emphasize professional power, aesthetics, identity, as well as attitudes of others.

The recent growth of data science expanded its reach to an ever-growing user base of nonexperts, increasing the need for usability, understandability, and explainability in these systems. Enhancing usability makes data systems accessible to people with different skills and backgrounds alike, leading to democratization of data systems. Furthermore, proper understanding of data and data-driven systems is necessary for the users to trust the function of the systems that learn from data. Finally, data systems should be transparent: when a data system behaves unexpectedly or malfunctions, the users deserve proper explanation of what caused the observed incident. Unfortunately, most existing data systems offer limited usability and support for explanations: these systems are usable only by experts with sound technical skills, and even expert users are hindered by the lack of transparency into the systems' inner workings and functions. The aim of my thesis is to bridge the usability gap between nonexpert users and complex data systems, aid all sort of users, including the expert ones, in data and system understanding, and provide explanations that help reason about unexpected outcomes involving data systems. Specifically, my thesis has the following three goals: (1) enhancing usability of data systems for nonexperts, (2) enable data understanding that can assist users in a variety of tasks such as achieving trust in data-driven machine learning, gaining data understanding, and data cleaning, and (3) explaining causes of unexpected outcomes involving data and data systems. For enhancing usability, we focus on example-driven user intent discovery. We develop systems based on example-driven interactions in two different settings: querying relational databases and personalized document summarization. Towards data understanding, we develop a new data-profiling primitive that can characterize tuples for which a machine-learned model is likely to produce untrustworthy predictions. We also develop an explanation framework to explain causes of such untrustworthy predictions. Additionally, this new data-profiling primitive enables interactive data cleaning. Finally, we develop two explanation frameworks, tailored to provide explanations in debugging data system components, including the data itself. The explanation frameworks focus on explaining the root cause of a concurrent application's intermittent failure and exposing issues in the data that cause a data-driven system to malfunction.

This article aims at discussing e-government website usability in relation to concerns about digital inclusion. E-government web design should consider all aspects of usability, including those that make it more accessible to all. Traditional concerns of social exclusion are being superseded by fears that lack of digital competence and information literacy may result in dangerous digital exclusion. Usability is considered as a way to address this exclusion and should therefore incorporate inclusion and accessibility guidelines. This article makes an explicit link between usability guidelines and digital inclusion and reports on a survey of local government web presence in Portugal.

This work presents a feature-oriented taxonomy for commercial electronic voting machines, which focuses on usability aspects. Based on this analysis, we propose a 'Just-Like-Paper' (JLP) classification method which identifies five broad categories of eVoting interface. We extend the classification to investigate its application as an indicator of voting efficiency and identify a universal ten-step process encompassing all possible voting steps spanning the twenty-six machines studied. Our analysis concludes that multi-functional and progressive interfaces are likely to be more efficient versus multi-modal voter-activated machines.

Aus Punkt 1: "Warum lohnt sich Semiotik gerade im Bereich Usability und Design? Mehr noch, die Semiotik als übergreifende Perspektive ist hier gar nicht zu vermeiden. (Vermeidbar ist allenfalls der Soziolekt bzw. Technolekt der akademischen Semiotik, nicht aber ein semiotisches Arbeiten selbst.) Das Denken vieler Designer ist eher visuell geprägt. Diese Ausrichtung auf non-verbale Formen und Handlungen scheint der Semiotik entgegen zu stehen. Die Semiotik hat zwar eine starke Tradition in der Linguistik, aber diese stellt nur eine von mehreren gleichwertigen Zugängen dar: Man denke etwa an die Medizin (wo visuelle und sonstige Symptome als Zeichen gedeutet werden), an die Malerei (wo es Repräsentationen für ästhetische, soziale und politische Entsprechungen gibt), an die Gestik (wo jede kleinere oder größere Bewegung eines Muskels mit Bedeutungen verknüpft ist) oder an die Musik (wo sehr abstrakte Tonfolgen mit emotionaler Dynamik verbunden sind) – dazu etwa Eco (2002), Nöth (2000), Hucklenbroich (2003), Mazzola (2003) sowie Grammer (2004). ."

Purpose– This paper aims to scrutinise the concept of "African Management" that increasingly fuels the debate on the management research of African organizations. Indeed, while management research in African context is all but invisible in management literature, the notion of "African management" emerges through a piecemeal corpus of literature that has arisen in response to the exclusion and marginalisation of Africa in the broad field of management literature. The idea underlying this reasoning is that the Western management model prevailing so far in Africa is inadequate because of cultural considerations. However, what is meant by "African management" still remains unfamiliar to both researchers and practitioners.Design/methodology/approach– The authors conduct a selective review of the fragmented "African management" literature to identify directions it follows. This is carried out through an analytical framework aiming at investigating the usability of the "African management".Findings– The paper identifies the key elements underlying the "African management" narrative. It also articulates these elements within a frame which represents an unprecedented attempt to render advocacy of "African management" more insightful.Originality/value– The vibrant economic trends of Africa and its forthcoming dynamics are on the spotlight. At the same time, this upturn raises again a central concern about African societies' development in which organisations are expected to play a pivotal role. Yet the paucity and fragmented nature of the current state of "African management" research do not enable either practitioners or academics to get a deep understanding of African organisations. This article constitutes a major contribution by setting up a scheme of identifying convincingly the analytical parameters that really count in African organisations.

This article searches for correlations between the practices of usability professionals from software development teams and the resulting usability of the system they are working on. After reviewing the literature of the past decade, we can conclude that most researchers try to achieve better usability with process proposals, but measurements focus on perceived usability. The level of involvement of users in the requirements capture phase is unclear. There is a trend to reduce costs of usability engineering, either by choosing more lightweight and informal methods or by trying to substitute user involvement. Looking at decade's worth of 452 articles about "agile AND usability" in Scopus, we selected 133 which deal with the integration of usability, UX and User Centred Design practices and Agile development.