Multimedia And Graphic Arts

This paper presents the development of a set of research-derived ageing-centred Web design guidelines. An initial set of guidelines was first developed through an extensive review of the HCI and ageing literature and through employing a series of classification methods (card sorting and affinity diagrams) were employed as a means for obtaining a revised and more robust set of guidelines. A group of older Web users were then involved in evaluating the usefulness of the guidelines. To provide evaluation context for these users, two websites targeted to older people were used. This study makes several contributions to the field. First, it is perhaps the first manuscript that proposes ageing-friendly guidelines that are for most part backed by published studies. Second, the guidelines proposed in this study have been thoroughly examined through a series of expert and user verifications, which should give users of these guidelines confidence of their validity.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of depth and breadth in the arrangement of web link hierarchies on the user preference, response time and errors. An experiment is reported, where previous menu depth/breath tradeoff procedures are applied to the web link domain. The variables evaluated were five different web page linking strategies with varying depth and breadth. The results indicate that task completion time increases as the depth of the web site structure increases.

Being one of the most commercially successful entertainment software applications, massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) continue to expand in term of the revenue they generate as well as the involvement of users who congregate in their virtual space and form communities around them to support each other. Unlike conventional offline computer games, or networked games with limited numbers of players, MMORPGs are not merely software applications as they are usually seen as a space with complicated dynamics of social interactions. Hence, it is believed that playing these games might cause cognitive overload problems among the players as they have to constantly interact with the game world as well as with other users. We conducted an exploratory study using qualitative methods to explore cognitive overloads in Maple Story, a typical MMORPG. Our results reveal that several types of cognitive overloads emerge during the game playing. While some of these overloads pose serious problems even to expert players, players seem to develop strategies to overcome them. It is found that some forms of cognitive load are actually desirable in order to make the game challenging. We have also created a set of recommendations that can help game developers handle cognitive load problems in MMORPGs.

This study investigates whether the websites of the top USA universities are ranked high in terms of accessibility and usability and if these two measures are correlated. The usability and accessibility of the top fifty USA universities (USNews, 2001) were measured using two automatic evaluation tools: Bobby and LIFT. The results show a low compliance (30%) with Web site Content Accessibility Guide and a low usability rating for most of the university websi tes. The accessibility approval was found to correlate significantly with overall usability ratings of the websites. The size (in Kb) of the website was found to be a driving variable both for usability and accessibility. Table 5: Three-Tiered Usability Ranking of Popular Web Sites

In this paper, we study the social network structure of an online discussion board within SeniorNet, an empathic online community for older people. We apply Social Network Analysis (SNA) to analyse the communication patterns and relationships between members of the discussion board. In addition to looking at the structure of the exchanged messages within the discussion board as a whole, we also investigate associations between the communication content and the social network patterns. Our findings show distinct differences between the social network patterns of empathic and non-empathic communications. For example, members are more connected and closer to each other in the social networks that are based on empathic communication compared to non-empathic communication. Additionally our results show that the type of empathic communication (e.g. different kinds of support) is linked to the social network structure within the discussion board.

With the computer being more integrated into daily life, more and more people need to read online information. Online information is often formatted in a similar fashion to printed information. But are they similar in their effectiveness? The present study investigates the effect of information format on user's preference and reading time when people read online information or printed information. The study tested one, two and threecolumn formats. This study involved forty two participants from three main adult age groups: young (18-40 years), middle-aged (40-65 years) and seniors (65+ years). The overall mean age was 50.0 years (S.D. = 20.44 years). Participants were divided into two reading groups: online and on paper. A balanced number of participants from each age group was assigned to each reading treatment. There was no significant difference in the reading speed and preference between different column formats. In agreement with findings from previous studies, reading on paper was 10-30% faster than reading online. The paper concludes with suggestions to designers of online information. As previous studies showed, some action needs to be taken to improve reading speed, such as using bigger font size or high contrast between the text and the background.

This paper examines previous research on the topic of depth versus breath in hierarchical menu structures, and explains why searching for information on the world wide web follows a similar model. It also proposes age related enhancements to available mathematical models, design guidelines where possible and future research topics in the area.

This paper presents an empirical study of an online learning community that collaborates with the course design team under the Participatory Design methodology. The different phases of this methodology where implemented using a four stage participatory design process (Zaphiris & Zacharia, 2001):

This study is aimed at answering whether aging/health-related web sites of different domain extensions (i.e. .com, .edu, .gov and .org) differ in their accessibility and usability, and whether these two measures are correlated. The usability and accessibility of governmental, organizational, educational and commercial aging/health-related web sites were compared using two automatic evaluation tools: Bobby and LIFT. The governmental web site group has the highest compliance with Web site Content Accessibility Guide although only 52% got an approved status. The accessibility approval was found to correlate significantly with overall usability ratings for all groups, except the commercial web site group.

This paper reports an investigation of older adults' needs and preferences concerning online social support. We focused our analysis on seven different aspects of online support: Self disclosure, Deep support, Light support, Community building, Information/Facts, Off topic, and Technical issues. For each aspect we were interested in how older adults perceive this aspect of support, what they think are the similarities and differences of this aspect of support in online settings vs offline settings, and what they perceive are the advantages and disadvantages of communicating this aspect of support online. We did this by conducting detailed interviews with three groups of older adults (31 people in total) with different levels of expertise in using the internet and online communication (older adults who do not use the internet, older adults who use only email, and older adults who participate in online support communities). Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed. Our findings describe older adults' perception of different aspects of support and identify their motivation for turning to online support and the reasons for any reluctance to do so. Thus, our findings give insight into how online support communities could best be utilized to improve older people's experience with online support. (P. Zaphiris), [email protected] (S. Wilson). 1 Tel.: +44 0 20 7040 4214; fax: +44 0 20 7040 8859. 2 Tel.: +44 0 20 7040 8152; fax: +44 0 20 7040 8859.

The present study utilized the card-sorting technique and cluster analysis to define the best information architecture of Web-based health information for older users. Some 16, older computer users participated in the card sorting, 20 in category identification and thirteen in category labeling experiments of 64 health and agingrelated Web pages from http://www.dmoz.org. The participants tended to group the items conceptually at higher levels of the hierarchy, but they tended to group the items based on similar words found in the titles at the lower level of the hierarchy. The study also found that user grouping produced more heterogeneous structure than the experimenters' predefined information architecture. Category labels suggested by seniors were observed to be less formal and perhaps more useful than the category labels from http://www.dmoz.org. ____________________ Sri H. Kurniawan is a lecturer in the Department of Computation, UMIST, Manchester M60 1QD, UK [email protected] Panayiotis Zaphiris is a lecturer in the

This study investigates the usability and content accessibility of today's UK e-government websites and investigates whether they are ranked high in terms of accessibility and usability and if these two measures are correlated. The usability and accessibility of fifty selected UK egovernment websites were measured using two automatic evaluation tools: Bobby and LIFT. Based on these automatic evaluation results, ten selected websites were further evaluated with expert evaluation methods: heuristics evaluation and cognitive walkthrough. Assistive technology was also used in the evaluation to assess the accessibility issues. The results show a relatively high compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and a relatively low usability rating for most UK e-government websites.