Purpose: The objective of the study is to design and validate an instrument that allows organizations to assess their status regarding the adoption of the critical success factors (CSFs) that enable lean six sigma (LSS) implementation in order to achieve the expected benefits.Design/methodology/approach: An extensive literature review was conducted to define the LSS CSFs that have to be considered for the development of the questionnaire that would later be applied across all manufacturing companies on the Northern Mexican border. Once the database was built, a statistical verification of the assumptions required for factor analysis took place. Finally, the due construct validation was carried out to verify whether the proposed instrument measured reliably what it is intended to.Findings: A questionnaire measuring nine CSFs, as well as the benefits associated with the implementation of LSS, was designed and validated through 61 items.Research limitations/implications: The main limitations of this study are that the research is cross-sectional and that the study was carried out taking as a reference only exporting manufacturing companies located in the border area between Mexico and the United States.Practical implications: The validated instrument is expected to serve as a useful tool for companies interested in the implementation of LSS.Originality/value: This study introduces a validated tool for the analysis of LSS CSFs while providing evidence of construct validity and the solid structure of the factors.

The need to compete for users’ attention and provide them with the best user experience has increased the use of persuasion strategies in modern systems. Currently, Persuasive Systems (PSs) promote healthy behavior for well-being, energy consumption, and learning. Although the educational domain has limited investigation compared to other areas, PSs in education have been shown to be effective in motivating students. This paper summarizes the existing evidence on Persuasive Educational Systems (PESs), emphasizing research on the current design methods, evaluation methods, and characteristics. We follow Kitchenham’s method to perform a systematic literature review about PESs published between 2014 and 2020, with 19 relevant studies selected. We highlight some results from the analysis of selected papers such as persuasion strategies, use of a personalized persuasion technique, study of students’ susceptibility to strategies, integration of gamification mechanisms, and proposed tools to design PES. Moreover, we discuss interesting facts such as the common practice of using more than one tool to design PES, aspects of interaction, persuasion, learning, and the challenges in evaluating persuasive impact. Finally, as the main contribution of the paper we identify the seven necessary characteristics to build a persuasive educational system.

Contribution: This article describes the process used to create a questionnaire to evaluate the usability of mobile learning applications (CECAM). The questionnaire includes specific questions to assess user interface usability and pedagogical usability. Background: Nowadays, mobile applications are expanding rapidly and are commonly used in educational institutions to support the learning and teaching process. But the possible deficient usability could decrease the utility of learning activities and the student’s motivation. Therefore, careful planning and design by the developer are required, along with a usability evaluation of the applications. Research Questions: How could an instrument be developed to evaluate the usability of m-learning applications that combine technical and pedagogical aspects? How can the quality of the developed instrument be determined? Methodology: A structured questionnaire was created like a measuring tool to evaluate and design m-learning applications. Different statistical techniques, including reliability and validity assessments, were employed to evaluate the quality of the instrument, which is determined through the calibration of the CECAM survey. Findings: After the validity analysis of the questionnaire, a scale with 56 items was obtained, with an alpha reliability coefficient of 0.911 (an excellent measuring scale). It pretends to be used by teachers to design or evaluate m-learning applications, improve their usability, and enhance the students’ learning experience.

The coronavirus COVID-19 swept the world in early 2020, working from home was a necessity. In the software industry, thousands of software developers began working from home, many did so on short notice, under difficult and stressful conditions. The emotions of developers can be affected by this situation. On the other hand, some well-known soft skills have been emphasized as required for working remotely. Software engineering research lacks theory and methodologies for addressing human aspects in software development. In this paper we present an exploratory study with a survey applied to practitioners in the west border area of Mexico-USA. It is focused on the developers’ wellbeing during pandemic, expressed as emotions, and the perceptions of the level in which soft skills are practiced/required in the working from home mode. The results show that high percent expressed to experience positive emotions, however, a portion of respondents expressed to feel negative emotions. In general terms, 91.0% of respondents expressed to be satisfied working from home, but some conditions should be improved. In the case of soft skills, some of them are revealed as practiced in high level in working from home, but still there is not consensus.

In recent days, we live the mobile health revolution as medical apps are flourishing in the marketplace for all the different mobile devices. Diabetes apps are the most prevalent chronic disease-specific apps available commercially for Android or iOS. This study presents a selection through a holistic evaluation of some mobile apps for preventing or managing diabetes. After the selection, the study presents an evaluation from two perspectives: 1) mapping the implemented persuasion strategies in the mobile apps and 2) a usability evaluation with real users. This paper presents an evaluation of six mobile apps (Diabetes Prevent, my Sugar, Intellin Diabetes, Social Diabetes, Glucose Buddy, and One-Touch Reveal) for diabetes management or prevention. The results reveal that most of the apps are focus on controlling the disease. They had an accepted SUS score. However, they are not implementing the persuasion strategies as it should be done for medical systems. These findings suggested that it is essential to develop mobile applications based on international regulations towards covering aspects such as diagnosis, prevention, monitoring, treatment, and alleviation of disease. Furthermore, the applications should include persuasion strategies and integrating usability guidelines to change user’s attitudes and behaviors and improve user satisfaction in mobile apps.

This paper presents the analysis of recent research on mobile learning and usability areas, applying a systematic mapping study. It also presents the main focus adopted by each publication, the types of mobile device and operative systems. The aim is also to understand the tendencies and needs in the fields of design and evaluation of the m-learning systems. Results demonstrate that research in the area has grown significantly since the 2012, and due to the recent boom of mobile devices in education, we believe that the number of studies will continue to grow in the following years. Also we identify a necessity when we see that not all the m-learning applications have used usability tests, we did not find guidelines or frameworks to evaluate them either. With this results and tendencies, we propose the creation of a model for evaluating the development phases in m-learning applications, considering pedagogical usability, student́s experience and user interface usability, to improve the quality of m-learning applications. Within this proposal we have also created a framework that supports different stages of our model.