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HCI at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) of the University of Puerto Rico - Mayagüez (UPRM) has taken center stage in the Computer Engineering program in just three years. This growth has been reflected in the academic programs, research, facilities, faculty, and students. Our research and academic emphasis is on usability engineering and programming of user interfaces.
HCI education, HCI research, usability engineering.
© 1997 Copyright on this material is held by the authors.
The human-computer interaction (HCI) initiative at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez was pioneered by three faculty members of the ECE Department. During the fall of 1992, this trio joined efforts to research the use of Spanish language for speech communication with computers. With funding from the Economic Development Administration of Puerto Rico for this applied research and with funding from NSF intended to improve the computer engineering academic and research programs, the research effort was underway with a group of undergraduate students. Later in 1994, the group received another grant from NSF to develop the research environment to start a doctoral program in computer science and engineering. This grant provided funds for two research areas: HCI and signal processing.
The NSF grant was instrumental for establishing the Center for Computing Research and Development that promotes research and development in different areas of computer science and engineering. This center is the administrative support for the research activities of the Human Computer Laboratory that was also established with the NSF grant and matching funds from the UPRM.
The main research topics currently being pursued are:
In addition to these research topics, a multimedia course is being developed for teaching Spanish writing skills in collaboration with two professors from the Hispanic Studies Department. Currently, our research group consists of 3 researchers, 10 graduate and 12 undergraduate students.
The HCI laboratory is located on newly remodeled facilities, which include a room for conducting experiments, an adjacent observation cabin with a one way mirror, and a room for developing user interface prototypes and applications. The lab is equipped with audio and video recording equipment, and several workstations.
The HCI component within the Computer Engineering Graduate Program started with a general course in Human Computer Interaction. Today, HCI represents the principal area of software concentration, with the following courses:
The HCI group has also been promoting the importance of HCI in the Computer Engineering undergraduate program and has begun to introduce HCI topics and modules in most of the traditional software curriculum.
Many undergraduate students are also exposed to HCI through an undergraduate research course. Students participate in the research projects being conducted, providing them with a different academic perspective. Our experience has shown that students involved in research are encouraged to continue graduate studies.
Usability engineering is an important component in most of our research projects. To handle the usability tests more efficiently, we have started a new approach by designating three students as official testers. These students are being trained in different usability testing techniques and will assist or perform tests for different research and development projects within our group.
The main goal of this research is to develop practical methodologies for designing usable World Wide Web pages. The proliferation of Web pages with poor usability suggests that most of the designers of Web pages have little knowledge of user interface design and usability engineering. This results in pages that wastes user's time, and could be responsible for a large amount of unnecessary traffic on the Internet.
We evaluated pages of existing information repositories and identified a variety of usability problems that were used to compile a list of guidelines for designing Web pages. The effectiveness of the guidelines were evaluated by conducting usability tests that compared user's performance with two versions of three Web pages selected randomly. The first version was the original home page found at the site, and the second was a redesign of the first applying the guidelines. The study [1] demonstrates that designers of Web pages can improve the usability of home pages by applying the guidelines proposed.
Additional studies are being conducted with different types of sites and of some specific guidelines to refine and produce a more complete set of guidelines. One project studies link names to determine how well these names provide a clue of the content of the page that they refer to and their effect on the usability of a page. Another study concerns the proper use of indexes, pop-up menus, and overview windows in Web pages.
The use of spoken language as an input modality can help overcome some limitations of pointer-based Web browsers and thus, improve user interfaces for browsing the Web. A speech-based Web browser was designed to study the usability of browsing using speech input. The main objectives of the tests conducted were to find if users can be effective using speech and to determine the users preferences between the speech and mouse modalities.
The most important finding of the study was that the choice for an interaction modality is governed more by the usability attribute of user satisfaction than by the efficiency of use. Most users prefer speech over mouse, even if they can be quicker with a mouse.
The documentation generated for patient care by nurses and physicians is almost always exorbitant. The time spent in this process subtracts from the time spent on direct patient care, thus lowering the quality of care as well as the efficiency at which this care is administered. Our research team is working together with local hospitals to develop user-centered interfaces to improve this process.
Our first objective on this project will be to develop a user interface prototype to handle physicians orders and nursing documentation. Usability engineering will be used for performance evaluation of the prototype.
Another related research project is a collaboration with a professor from the Industrial Engineering Department. Its goal is to develop an environment to be used for auto supervision, flow distribution, and process control in an emergency room.
This research project is concerned with the study of human dialogues to identify the aspects of interaction that account for the structure of the dialogue. One such aspect is the turn-taking nature of human dialogue [2]. Another aspect of human-dialogues is the use of context to interpret the user's actions. This context (or focus) could be used by the user to provide contextual references as actions in graphical user interfaces [3].
The goal of this research effort is to find analogies from human-dialogues that map to human-computer interaction in order to make human-computer interaction more "natural." A second goal is to identify data representations and algorithms that are needed to implement such dialogues.
The HCI-initiative in our department is just getting started. In the next year we expect to complete a proposal for a Doctoral Program in Computer Engineering with HCI being one of the areas of specialization. In the future we plan to extend our course offerings by expanding our liaisons with faculty members in other departments. This will allow us to offer courses in Human Factors, Linguistics, and other HCI-related topics.
We are also engaged in the dissemination of HCI education and research within Puerto Rico, and to some extent, to part of Latin America. To that extent we plan to continue promoting seminars and lectures by our faculty to other local universities and industries. Our recent involvement in ADMI 96 was a tremendous success and generated lots of interests from representatives of minority institutions.
1. Borges, J., Morales, I., and Rodriguez, N., Guidelines for Designing Usable World Wide Web Pages, in Companion of CHI 96, pp. 277-278.
2. Pérez-Quiñones, M. A., Sibert, J. L., A Collaborative Model of Feedback in Human-Computer Interaction, in Proceedings of CHI 96, pp. 316-323.
3. Pérez, M. A., Sibert, J. L., Focus in Graphical User Interfaces, in Proceedings of the 1993 International Workshop on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp. 255-257.
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