The cell phone is an information appliance that has been widely used. It provides instant access to information and makes people more ‘connected’. The objective of our study is to investigate the relationship among the design features of the cell phone and identify the most important design features and design factors. In our survey study, we asked 1,006 college students using a 7-point Likert scale structured questionnaire to evaluate their preference of the design features and overall satisfaction of their current cell phone. Nine design factors were derived. Ten cell phone design features and five design factors that significantly impact a user's satisfaction were identified. The most important design features are: the physical appearance, size and menu organisation, which together account for 42% of the total variance of a user's overall satisfaction.
19 November 2010 in Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries
Objectives: Although medical artificial intelligence (AI) systems that assist healthcare professionals in critical care settings are expected to improve healthcare, skepticism exists regarding whether their potential has been fully actualized. Therefore, we aimed to conduct a qualitative study with physicians and nurses to understand their needs, expectations, and concerns regarding medical AI; explore their expected responses to recommendations by medical AI that contradicted their judgments; and derive strategies to implement medical AI in practice successfully.Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 healthcare professionals working in the emergency room and intensive care unit in a tertiary teaching hospital in Seoul. The data were interpreted using summative content analysis. In total, 26 medical AI topics were extracted from the interviews. Eight were related to treatment recommendation, seven were related to diagnosis prediction, and seven were related to process improvement.Results: While the participants expressed expectations that medical AI could enhance their patients’ outcomes, increase work efficiency, and reduce hospital operating costs, they also mentioned concerns regarding distortions in the workflow, deskilling, alert fatigue, and unsophisticated algorithms. If medical AI decisions contradicted their judgment, most participants would consult other medical staff and thereafter reconsider their initial judgment.Conclusions: Healthcare professionals wanted to use medical AI in practice and emphasized that artificial intelligence systems should be trustworthy from the standpoint of healthcare professionals. They also highlighted the importance of alert fatigue management and the integration of AI systems into the workflow.
30 June 2009 in Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing
Heuristic evaluation is a famous usability inspection method often used in the assessment of Augmented Reality (AR) systems. Usability heuristics can be characterized as general or specific to a domain. During comparative studies between a new and a traditional set of heuristics, the focus is often around performance metrics (number of problems, time, errors), and little attention is given to the experience itself (i.e., evaluator’s overall satisfaction toward utilization of the set of heuristics). In addition, limited research has been done on the application of heuristics to evaluate interfaces with different levels of interaction, along with how a longer set of low-level heuristics compares against a traditionally-sized set of high-level heuristics. In this study, recruited participants (mostly university students) performed a heuristic evaluation using either a set of 110 specific heuristics (SH) or a set of 23 general heuristics (GH) to evaluate two versions of an AR application, designed with a low and a high level of interactivity. Big Five personality traits, prior experience with AR or Virtual Reality systems, and various usability data (e.g., subjective ratings related to the usability of heuristics and AR application, number of unique problems, and severity ratings) were collected through questionnaires and utilized during statistical analysis. Results show that even though the employment of the set of GH produced higher overall satisfaction of evaluators, the set of SH resulted in a significantly larger number of unique usability problems. Furthermore, the more interactive version of the AR application was perceived by evaluators as the harder version to inspect, regardless of the set of heuristics utilized. Neuroticism and agreeableness traits were found with a significant impact on subjective usability ratings.