User experience methodology for the design and evaluation of interactive systems (PhD)

Heuristic evaluation is one of the most used and discount usability evaluation methodologies. However, it has some manual steps that could be semi-automated to decrease the time spent to carry out the methodology and, in consequence, the budget invested in the development process of an interactive system. In addition, the quality of a product has evolved, in general terms, from the usability to the user experience. Therefore, according to both aspects, manual steps of the heuristic evaluation and evolution towards user experience, a new methodology based on heuristics is proposed for considering user experience in the design and evaluation steps of the development process of an interactive system. This methodology semi-automates the selection of the best heuristics for a specific interactive system, it supports heuristic evaluation per se and, finally, it provides quantitative, qualitative, summative and formative results through the ISO/IEC 25062:2006 standard for software engineering. Software product Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE). Common Industry Format (CIF) for usability test reports. Furthermore, this methodology is implemented in Open-HEREDEUX: Open HEuristic REsource for Designing and Evaluating User eXperience.

Interacting with semantic web data through an automatic information architecture (PhD)

The proliferation of Linked Open Data and other data publishing initiatives has increased the amount of data available for analysis and reuse. However, in most cases it is very difficult for users to explore and use this data, especially for those without experience with semantic web technologies. Our contribution to solving this problem is applying the Visual Information-Seeking Mantra: “Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand”, which is implemented using Information Architecture components automatically generated from data and ontologies. This thesis offers algorithms and methods to automatically generate and drive the information architecture components for websites based on semantic web data. Through these components, it is possible to explore and visualize data. Moreover, even lay-users are capable of building complex queries without requiring to learn complicated technologies or knowing the vocabularies used in the explored datasets. This approach has been implemented and tested in Rhizomer, a tool capable of publishing Semantic Web datasets while facilitating user awareness of the published content. Our contributions have been validated with end users as part of a User Centred Design development process.