A recent thread of usability research is the investigation of the relationship between a product’s degree of usability and its degree of beauty. Previous research endeavors have found support for both “what is beautiful is usable” and “what is usable is beautiful” claims, emphasizing the need for further study on the topic. The current study was performed to further investigate this relationship by manipulating usability indirectly – by use of a functional prime, and by experimentally manipulating aesthetic principles. One hundred twenty-two participants rated sixteen manipulated on four aesthetic principles: symmetry, composition, curvature, and prototypicality after being presented with one of two functional primes. Results indicate that the aesthetic principles of symmetry and composition are independent primed function whereas curvature was dependent on priming.

Numerous studies have investigated the relationship between a product’s degree of usability and its degree of beauty. Both directions of causality have been demonstrated leading to “what is beautiful is usable” and “what is usable is beautiful hypothesis. Additionally, aesthetic research has demonstrated several principles that elicit a consistent pattern of responses. The current study aimed to investigate the relationship between aesthetics and usability by means of a functional prime. Forty participants rated sixteen stimuli manipulated on four aesthetic principles; prototypicality, symmetry, composition, and shape. Mixed results indicate that certain aesthetic principles interact with one another in a functional usage.

Résumés sometimes contain graphical elements, and the use of such “graphical résumés” may be increasing. The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of including different types of graphical elements in a résumé on the most important outcome measure from the perspective of the applicant – the probability of a positive selection decision by the evaluator. There was a reliable preference for a textual résumé when participants asked which design they thought would be most effective. However, there was no reliable effect of résumé design on evaluator’s decisions about the applicant whose qualifications were represented.

In order to compare the strategies consumers use to make predictions about the ease-of-use of products, the authors conducted a card sorting exercise with subject-matter experts (SMEs) to refine a coding scheme from current, widely-used usability definitions and measurement tools. Nine SMEs sorted 83 cards containing aspects found in usability definitions, guidelines, measurement tools and descriptions. The resulting fifteen clusters define a coding scheme that is both comprehensive and flexible. The refined taxonomy does not seek to redefine usability, but to provide a mechanism for researchers wanting to use a coding scheme that includes methods for classifying strategies such as usability attribution to system features, metacognitive behaviors (planning and evaluating), and exemplar-based strategies (memory for performing similar tasks).

The domain of welding recently has seen the introduction of numerous potential aids to the practitioners who monitor welding robots (“welbots”) or perform welds themselves. One such aid is the visual augmentation or visualization of particular weld pool parameters. The purpose of this study was to examine the potential effects of a simple, geometric weld pool visualization on the ability of novice welders to relate what they witnessed in welding videos to the completed welds on physically-present pipes (a situation awareness outcome). In addition to participants’ accuracies on the situation awareness measure, perceived usability and subjective workload were also assessed. There was no reliable benefit for the augmented condition compared to the raw, unedited video condition. The results may indicate a task specificity for the type of augmentation utilized or possible limitations of the current rendering methods.

Résumés sometimes contain graphical elements, and the use of such “graphical résumés” may be increasing. The purpose of this study was to compare the effect of including different types of graphical elements in a résumé on the most important outcome measure from the perspective of the applicant – the probability of a positive selection decision by the evaluator. There was a reliable preference for a textual résumé when participants asked which design they thought would be most effective. However, there was no reliable effect of résumé design on evaluator’s decisions about the applicant whose qualifications were represented.

With the current trend toward semi-autonomous welding systems, the typical duties of a skilled welder are likely to transition from that of manual operator to a more supervisory role. The shifting demands on welders necessitates novel welding displays to support an increased variety of tasks. The current work utilizes applied cognitive task analysis to identify the needs of expert welders, specifically in regards to the identification of important sensory cues useful when monitoring the welding process in real-time. Results are presented in a cognitive demands table in a manner intended to be useful to multidisciplinary teams engaged in the development of future welding platforms.

Consumers’ expectations about the usability of products may be an important contributor to their overall satisfaction with a design. The purpose of this study was to explore how incongruencies between predicted usability and actual usability of a design affect a user’s post-use satisfaction ratings for a design. Participants predicted the usability of two stove designs and then used the designs to perform a task. Interactive stoves had varying degrees of burner-knob s-r compatibility. In general, the relative dissatisfaction associated with the “hard” design compared to the “easy” design was dependent on the initial usability prediction of the participant. Participants who initially predicted the design would be difficult-to-use had lower satisfaction ratings for easy-to-use designs than participants who initially predicted the same designs would be easy-to-use. These finding suggests that making a product look easy-to-use may be as important as actually making it easy-to-use, therefore designers should consider designing for both initial impressions of usability as well as actual usability.

Grids, matrices, and tables are commonly used to organize information. A number of design techniques and psychological principles address how viewers’ eyes can be guided through a visual work. Designers refer to such objectives as "creating visual flow." One common technique, “zebra-shading,” is intended to guide eyes through the grid by alternating shaded and unshaded rows or columns. However, the effects of these manipulations have largely not been explored experimentally. We will review the techniques designers use to guide the eyes of their audience, associated psychological foundations, and outline some research done on the graphic design of a specific type of grid: tables. Then, we will describe an experiment wherein participants conducted a visual search task in grids with different shading manipulations. The analysis showed data trending toward improved response time when the target followed the shading.

We present a current multi-study process aimed at developing a hybrid-reality display for use in remote welding. Results from an initial user study and applied cognitive task analysis are discussed along with possible future development directions.

We present a new hybrid reality system that supports the monitoring and visualizing of a welding system. Our system first uses 3D scanning techniques to create a digital model of objects to be welded. Based on the model, a mock-up is constructed from a set of templates or 3D printed. The welding process is captured by cameras and visualized on the 3D mock-up using projectors. The welder can therefore monitor the welding process as if the welding is on the mock-up with proper spatial and 3D cues. An initial user performance evaluation of the system demonstrated several cognitive and performance benefits of the current implementation and suggests avenues for future research.

A recent trend in consumer and military electronics has been to allow operators the option to control the system via novel control methods. The most prevalent and available form of these methods is that of vocal control. Vocal control allows for the control of a system by speaking commands rather than manually inputting them. This has implications not only for increased productivity, but also for optimizing safety as well as for assisting the disabled population. Past research has examined the potential costs and benefits to this novel control scheme with varying results. The purpose of this study was to further examine the relationship between modality of input, operator workload, and expertise. The results obtained indicated that vocal control may not be ideal in all situations as a method of input, as participants experienced significantly higher amounts of workload than those in the manual condition. Additionally, expertise may be more specific than previously thought, as participants in the vocal condition performed nearly identical at the task regardless of gaming expertise. The implications of the findings for this study suggest that vocal control be further examined as an effective method of user input, especially with regards to expertise and training effects.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Teaching with Software Defined Radios Abstract This paper discusses the utilization of a relatively inexpensive wideband radio receiver in combination with a digital down converter (DDC) based data recorder to capture and record real world radio signals. The resulting in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) data files are then imported into M ATLAB for processing. This batch processing of real world radio signals allows for a tremendous amount of classroom flexibility in the discussion of software defined radio topics. 1 Introduction There is a great deal of interest in the DSP algorithms necessary to demodulate communications signals. While a number of existing courses cover these topics, the use of real world communi- cations signals to develop and test these algorithms can be problematic. For many universities, the largest challenge in working with real world signals is the cost of the equipment necessary to detect, track, and capture the signals of interest. Two instrument grade, but costly, solutions to this signal capture problem can be found in references1 and.2 An alternative to the instrument grade test and measurement equipment solution is the use of a commercial-off-the-shelf system that was originally designed to support the amateur radio com- munity. A photograph of the high speed streaming digitizer, SDR-14,3 is shown in Figure 1. In this capacity the system provides filtering, amplification, and samples for signals from 0.1 MHz to 30 MHz. The resulting information is then streamed as decimated in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) data to a host computer using a USB connection. Figure 2 shows a typical display for a system setup to capture a weak commercial AM radio station’s signal. Unlike a number of available signal capture devices, this system is reasonably priced (approxi- mately 1,000 USD) and is only limited in its recording capability by the available storage of the host computer’s hard drive. For example, a one minute recording of an AM radio station created a 10 MB file. 2 Commercial AM Using only a simple loop antenna connected directly to the SDR-14, the signal is captured and the resulting file is imported into M ATLAB for processing and algorithm development. For AM