This study is a comprehensive research effort aimed at evaluating a computer system design methodology. It reports on the 1984 Olympic Message System (OMS), a voice mail system that was developed according to three behavioral principles. It describes a project from start to finish-from design and development to actual use by the customer. This research is unique in that part of its purpose was to carry out a case study of system design methodology. Consequently, the research effort involved keeping a diary; recording observations, results, and personal feelings; retaining early versions of materials; and building a usage analysis recording system in the final product and carrying out the analyses later.Fifteen behavioral methodologies used to achieve good usability are described. The dates, times, methodologies used, and numbers of people involved, as well as results, explain how the system development actually proceeded. Ali aspects of usability evolved in parallel and under one focus of responsibility. We also mention some mistakes made and how the hehavioral methodologies allowed us to identify and recover from them. This makes it possible for the reader to learn when and how a particular methodology contrihutes to the design process, and how long i( may take to carry out. PRINCIPLES OF SYSTEM DESIGNIn the past decade, we have been trying to arrive at procedures that couid he used to develop computerbased systems that are reliable, responsive, easy to learn, useful, and desirable. We have recommended three principles [10,11] to test this research:

Rendezvous is a conference call solution that leverages Voice over IP, enterprise calendaring, instant messaging, and rich client functionality to enhance the user experience and effectiveness of distributed meetings. We describe the service, and two of its user experience innovations -the conference call proxy and iHelpwhich function as digital backchannels. We present results from a preliminary user evaluation, and discuss our notion of digital backchannels with respect to the social translucence framework.

Website privacy policies state the ways that a site will use personal identifiable information (PII) that is collected from fields and forms in web-based transactions. Since these policies can be complex, machine-readable versions have been developed that allow automatic comparison of a site's privacy policy with a user's privacy preferences. However, it is still difficult for users to determine the cause and origin of conformance conflicts, because current standards operate at the page level -they can only say that there is a conflict on the page, not where the conflict occurs or what causes it. In this paper we describe fine-grained policy anchors, an extension to the way a website implements the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P), that solves this problem. Fine grained policy anchors enable field-level comparisons of policy and preference, field-specific conformance displays, and faster access to additional conformance information. We built a prototype user agent based on these extensions and tested it with representative users. We found that fine-grained anchors do help users understand how privacy policy relates to their privacy preferences, and where and why conformance conflicts occur.

No abstract

As mobile computing devices and a variety of sensors become ubiquitous, new resources for applications and services - often collectively referred to under the rubric of context-aware computing - are becoming available to designers and developers. In this article, we consider the potential benefits and issues that arise from leveraging context awareness in new communication services that include the convergence of VoIP (voice over IP) and traditional information technology.