BackgroundComputer-mediated educational applications can provide a self-paced, interactive environment to deliver educational content to individuals about their health condition. These programs have been used to deliver health-related information about a variety of topics, including breast cancer screening, asthma management, and injury prevention. We have designed the Patient Education and Motivation Tool (PEMT), an interactive computer-based educational program based on behavioral, cognitive, and humanistic learning theories. The tool is designed to educate users and has three key components: screening, learning, and evaluation.ObjectiveThe objective of this tutorial is to illustrate a heuristic evaluation using a computer-based patient education program (PEMT) as a case study. The aims were to improve the usability of PEMT through heuristic evaluation of the interface; to report the results of these usability evaluations; to make changes based on the findings of the usability experts; and to describe the benefits and limitations of applying usability evaluations to PEMT.MethodsPEMT was evaluated by three usability experts using Nielsen’s usability heuristics while reviewing the interface to produce a list of heuristic violations with severity ratings. The violations were sorted by heuristic and ordered from most to least severe within each heuristic.ResultsA total of 127 violations were identified with a median severity of 3 (range 0 to 4 with 0 = no problem to 4 = catastrophic problem). Results showed 13 violations for visibility (median severity = 2), 38 violations for match between system and real world (median severity = 2), 6 violations for user control and freedom (median severity = 3), 34 violations for consistency and standards (median severity = 2), 11 violations for error severity (median severity = 3), 1 violation for recognition and control (median severity = 3), 7 violations for flexibility and efficiency (median severity = 2), 9 violations for aesthetic and minimalist design (median severity = 2), 4 violations for help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors (median severity = 3), and 4 violations for help and documentation (median severity = 4).ConclusionWe describe the heuristic evaluation method employed to assess the usability of PEMT, a method which uncovers heuristic violations in the interface design in a quick and efficient manner. Bringing together usability experts and health professionals to evaluate a computer-mediated patient education program can help to identify problems in a timely manner. This makes this method particularly well suited to the iterative design process when developing other computer-mediated health education programs. Heuristic evaluations provided a means to assess the user interface of PEMT.

Speech recognition can be a powerful tool for use in human -computer interaction, especially in situations where the user's hands are unavailable or otherwise engaged. Researchers have confirmed that existing mechanisms for speech-based cursor control are both slow and error prone. To address this, we evaluated two variations of a novel gridbased cursor controlled via speech recognition. One provides users with nine cursors that can be used to specify the desired location while the second, more traditional solution, provides a single cursor. Our results confirmed a speed/accuracy trade-off with a ninecursor variant allowing for faster task completion times while the one-cursor version resulted in reduced error rates. Our solutions eliminated the effect of distance, and dramatically reduced the importance of target size as compared to previous speech-based cursor control mechanisms. The results are explored through a predictive model and comparisons with results from earlier studies.

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The small screen size of handheld mobile devices poses an inherent problem in visualizing data: very often it is too difficult and unpleasant to navigate through the plethora of presented information. This paper presents a novel approach to personalized and adaptive content presentation for handheld devices, which has been implemented in a mobile financial application system based on a 3-tier architecture. The approach is independent of wireless networks and mobile devices. It utilizes a combination of user profiling, data clustering, and visualization techniques (fisheye and semantic zooming), enhancing the understandability of the data and improving the usability of the device.

Informal note taking is an essential activity in Personal Information Management (PIM). Most mobile devices support this via a suite of applications, employing both highly structured (e.g., calendar, task list, contacts) and loosely structured (e.g., memos) data formats. Contextual interviews and artifact inspections with expert PIM-on-PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) users explored task-toapplication mapping. Structured tools were routinely avoided for informal note taking in favor of unstructured ones, even though this made managing the information more difficult. Improved support lies somewhere in between, suggesting the design of an integrated architecture, which links data across all PIM tools and provides a persistent, universal organizational system.