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Emergencies, such as fires, pose major risks to long-term care hospitals, where residents often face cognitive and physical impairments that impede evacuation. Conventional evacuation devices, such as rescue chutes and descent mechanisms, are frequently unsuitable, leading to delayed evacuations and casualties. This study develops and evaluates the usability of a wheelchair-accessible evacuation lift designed to address these challenges. The device enables vertical evacuation without electricity and supports weights up to 400kg to accommodate wheelchair users and caregivers. Usability evaluations were conducted on 15 participants who performed evacuation tasks including boarding, descending, and disembarking. Physiological signals (electromyography, heart rate, and breathing rate) were recorded to assess physical strain. The results showed increased muscle activity, particularly in the left arm (43.73% muscle usage), and elevated heart and breathing rates, indicating the need for user training to reduce physical stress. Overall, the participants rated the lift positively in terms of safety (mean score: 4.11/5), functionality (4.34/5), and convenience (4.51/5). Key improvement areas include the addition of nonslip surfaces, better wheelchair restraints, and user-friendly lever designs. These findings demonstrate the evacuation lift’s potential to improve safety during emergencies. Further refinements and simulations in realistic scenarios are recommended to enhance its usability and effectiveness.

The worldwide mobile software market has grown dramatically since feature phones became popular in the early 1990s. In practice, mobile usability — which can be defined for a resource-constrained device in two ways, namely, User eXperience (UX) and User Interface (UI) — has been regarded as the key to gaining superiority in terms of both market share and customer loyalty. Unfortunately, de facto standards for software design and the development process, such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Rational Unified Process (RUP), do not seem to promote mobile usability in a systematic manner in practice. This paper proposes a systematic and generalizable approach to modeling and evaluating the properties of mobile usability, herein treating it as a first-class software quality from the perspective of software engineering. We devise a UX evaluation framework for mobile usability, which we call UX Evaluation Framework (UEF) throughout this paper. A UX is specified by inter-scene interactions between users and terminals of software products using Extended Menu Navigation Viewpoints (EMNVs); then, a model checker, NuSMV, is adopted to observe whether the EMNV model meets a set of given UX properties. Importantly, the analysis and design of RUP is extended to support the co-design of UX and UI so that major roles, activities and artifacts in the UX and UI can be explicitly monitored and controlled by stakeholders. Through case studies, we demonstrate that UEF works properly to treat software products that prioritize mobile usability. Consequently, UEF plays a key role in filling the gap between two research disciplines to address usability: software engineering and human–computer interactions.

This paper presents and discusses a survey of existing tools to support design and evaluation of websites, with special emphasis on improving the information navigation process. The amount of information of today's websites, the continuous evolution of the medium and the heterogeneity of typical users' profiles, make the website design task particularly hard. The presented tools are mainly based on recent models of Web usage behavior, and involve various natural language and semantic similarity modeling methods. Validation studies of the presented tools have shown that they can support effectively various phases of the website design lifecycle including information structuring, hyperlink evaluation and assessment of alternative designs. In this paper, existing techniques are discussed, the aspects of Web design that (should and) could be better supported are identified and suggestions are made on extensions of existing approaches to better support the usability evaluation process.

Software development for computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) is a notoriously difficult task, involving often concurrent processes which are bound up with rigid timing constraints. To cope effectively with this difficulty, we propose in this paper the use of abstract finite-state models. The utility of these models is illustrated by encoding a CSCW system that we have built into finite-state automata, specifying in them a number of desired properties with temporal logic, and verifying these properties with model checking. By incorporating timing constraints into this process, we also gain insight into the usability of our system in real cooperative scenarios.

Effectively selling products online is a challenging task. Today's product domains often contain a dizzying variety of brands and models with highly complex sets of characteristics. This paper addresses the problem of supporting product search and selection in domains containing large numbers of alternatives with complex sets of features. A number of online shopping websites provide product choice assistance by making direct use of Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT). While the MAUT approach is appealing due to its solid theoretical foundations, there are several reasons that it does not fit well with people's decision making behavior.

This paper presents an approach designed to better fit with people's natural decision making process. The system is called VMAP for Visualizing Multi-Attribute Preferences. VMAP provides on one screen both a multi-attribute preference tool (MAP-tool) and a product visualization tool (V-tool). The product visualization tool displays the set of available products, with each product displayed as a point in a 3D attribute space. By viewing the product space, users can gain an overview of the range of available products, as well as an understanding of the relationships between their attributes. The MAP-tool integrates expression of preferences and filter conditions, which are then immediately reflected in the V-tool display. In this way, the user can immediately see the consequences of his expressed preferences on the product space.

The VMAP system is evaluated on a number of factors by comparing users' subjective ratings of the system to those of a more traditional MAUT product selection tool. The results show that while VMAP is somewhat more difficult to use than a traditional MAUT product selection tool, it provides better flexibility, provides the ability to more effectively explore the product domain, and produces more confidence in the selected product.

A widely used instrument to assess the quality of web interfaces is the so called heuristic evaluation. However, the evaluation criteria mentioned in commonly used heuristics, like for example the 10 heuristics of Nielsen (1994) are too generic for an in-detail analysis of certain website components and so extensive knowledge in the field of user interface design is needed, in order to be able to use these guidelines in a purposeful manner. To simplify this process, within the project "E-lib.ch – Swiss Electronic Library" a modular list of criteria was elaborated, which allows considering the specific aspects of library websites and in particular of their online catalogues. Therefore, this criteria list is suited to be used for self-evaluations by the library staff.