Research Projects:

Which Usability Engineering Method When?

I’ve been working with master’s students Di Liu and Rebecca Kuipers and with iSchool assistant professor Matt Lease on an empirical examination of the efficacy of crowdsourced usability testing (see Liu, D., Lease, M., Kuipers, R., & Bias. R. [2012]. Crowdsourcing for usability testing. Technical report, School of Information, University of Texas at Austin, March. arXiv:1203.1468.). This dovetails with some experimental research on usability methods I am currently planning with Dr. Phil Kortum, Professor in the Practice and Faculty Fellow in the Rice University Department of Psychology. Watch this space for progress in the growth of the science of usability.

Multi-tasking

Or should we say “task switching?” Doctoral student Ji Hyun Park and I are planning to expand our work on humans’ ability to multi-task (see Park, J. H., & Bias, R. G. [2012]. Understanding human multitasking behaviors through a lens of Goal-Systems Theory. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Library and Information Science Education, Dallas, January).

Usability support of OpenText

We have been providing ongoing usability engineering support, including mostly remote usability testing from the Information eXperience Lab, of OpenText's emerging next generation of web content management software applications.

Data Visualization Project for Emerson Process Management

Dan He and Henna Kim have been helping me recently with a project whereby we are analyzing the data needs of chemical control room operators, with our goal being to improve the display of information to them, to assist in making excellent, timely decisions.

Fitts' Law Project

Perhaps the most well-known law in the field of human-computer interaction, Fitts' Law specifies the function for the time it takes to acquire a target (say, click on an icon) based on the size of the target and its distance from the current location of the cursor. With Doug Gillan, Chairman of the Psychology Department of North Carolina State University, I am conducting a series of studies to quantify the role of cost of an error, within Fitts' Law. That is, Doug and I believe that the more costly an error (and the harder the recovery therefrom), the longer the time to acquire a target (ceteris paribus).