Autumn 2016/2017

Analysis of usability smells through the eye-tracking

Date:  January 2017
Experiment conductor: Martin Svrček
Supervisor: prof. Ing. Mária Bieliková, PhD.
Short description: Nowadays, usability or user experience is very popular field and especially in the context of web, there is a lot research papers in this area. Within this issue, the main purpose is to detect various anomalies of the design of these applications and web pages. These anomalies are also called usability smells. Such detection is currently performed manually by experts on usability, who reveal these anomalies by evaluating the user studies. The efforts of a number of studies in this field is to automate this process in some way. Similar methods will be able to detect different usability smells. Available methods and approaches used solely records of user activity in the form of clicks, scrolling or keyboard input. Our aim is to analyze a gaze of the users to determine the characteristics or metrics that can detect usability smells and improve the process of their identification. More specifically, we focused on websites. As a part of our work, we created a list of 52 usability smells based on available research in this area due to fact that we can not find similar list in such a complete form. In order to find the gaze characteristics, we performed user study with eye-tracking, where participants had to perform some simple tasks on specific web site. Participants were divided into two groups. First group worked with web page with usability smells and second group worked with the same web page but without usability smells. Then, we compared each gaze metric as the length and number of fixations between these two groups in order to identify gaze characteristics which can reveal usability smells.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Instruction usage during user studies

Date:  December 2016
Experiment conductor: Jozef Melicherčík, Erik Chodorčuk (FIIT)
Supervisor: Ing. Patrik Hlaváč
Short description: User testing enables identification of problems and defects of the product, and its goal is to find these mistakes and eliminate them to improve user experience. During the study it may leads to different situations and the participants can be affected by stress, confusion, they do not know how to solve the task, etc. The participant must be informed good, timely and effectively to successful user study. The main task of this experiment is to find a model of confusion. This model will be presented as data from the eye-tracker with which we will be able to identify participant’s state of confusion and then will be provided instructions automatically. The experiment consists of six tasks. The tasks are simple, and each of them includes a set of instructions. Then we observe the same period of time just before the user clicked for the instructions. Then we create a model of confusion, when person is confused and must use the instructions. If we find a correlation between the obtained model of confusion and stress, which causes the problem area in our test, the system will automatically be able to show the instructions for participants, which will have a positive impact on the successful completion of tests.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Eye tracking of schizophrenic patients during the Rorschach study

Date:  December 2016
Experiment conductor: Eva Smolejová (FiF UK), Martin Svrček (FIIT)
Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Anton Heretik PhD. (FiF UK)
Short description: Comparison of physiological parameters of various eye movement of schizophrenic patients and common population during visual processing of tables of Rorschach test using eye tracking technology.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Towards Automating Analysis of Eye Tracking User Studies

Date: April 2016
Experiment conductor: Peter Dubec
Supervisor: prof. Ing. Mária Bieliková PhD.
Short description: Nowadays usability testing of mobile applications with use of eye-tracking is realized as traditional usability testing. It is not possible to perform mobile usability testing on multiple participants simultaneously, therefore in most cases these tests are qualitative and not quantitative because we are able to collect only small amount of data. Our main goal is to make bulk testing of mobile applications possible by means of simulating mobile applications on PC and collecting data from PC.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Development,testing and evaluation of mathematical educational software

Date:  December 2016
Experiment conductor: Alžbeta Bachroníková (FMFI)
Supervisor: RNDr. Peter Borovanský, PhD.
Short description: For my bachelor thesis I created an educational software, in which users can practice and verify their math skills using the Hejny method. The developed application was adjusted for a target group, consisting of students of elementary school. Despite the fact, that application was successful and it serves its purpose, we believe that some phenomena still can be improved and user experience can be better. We will test usability with eyetracking, because this technique can reveal facts and problems which experimenter cannot easily notice (or cannot notice at all). After analyzing and evaluation of collected data, we will design and develop new application, which will guarantees the best user experience possible.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

 

Detection of problematic sections for users while working with visualization

Date:  November 2016
Experiment conductor: Adam Bacho
Supervisor: Ing. Róbert Móro
Short description: Today, people collect data from a vast number of different sources. Their goal is to analyze this data for specific purposes. One of the most common ways of visualizing data in the process of knowledge discovery are decision trees, which may in certain exploratory analysis tools support decision of users. Specifically, we want be able to detect problematic sections of individual users when working with decision trees. The main resource that will enter the process of problems detection will be data obtained by tracking users’ gaze. These provide us with a large number of metrics that can significantly affect the quality of problematic parts detection. Another metrics that we plan to deal with are the number and length of fixations, saccades and AOIS’s semantics as it will be important to find out where the users look mostly, or where problems arise. It will be interesting to include metrics of the outside (ambient) and central (focal) perception as well. All these data are then used for problems detection using random forests, since it is highly effective when used for different purposes.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Reservation system FIIT STU. Observing behavior of testing

Date:  November 2016
Experiment conductor: Daniel Vašek
Supervisor:
Short description:
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

What can an eye tracker tell us about filled out electronic questionnaire?

Date:  November 2016
Experiment conductor: Dávid Csomor
Supervisor: Mgr. Alena Kovárová, PhD.
Short description: Main motivation behind this project is to identify and analyze correlation between the certain user behavior and the and the answer he selects in the electronic questionnaire. We consider problematic elements, which may increase cognitive load of the subject and result in a certain behavior, in other words in a certain answer.
Electronic questionnaire consists of instructions, questions with answers and feedback questionnaire in which the subject answers questions which should verify our hypotheses and their correctness. Selecting and placing of all the items of the electronic questionnaire, in other words the use of a certain font, font size, placement of items, order of items and so on is not negligible concerning the way the subject fills out the electronic questionnaire and the correctness of the answer.
Our goal is to collect data, which will allow us to find and verify our hypotheses about the questions in the questionnaire, which may help the researchers identify problematic questions in electronic questionnaire.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

User experience and emotions

Date:  November 2016
Experiment conductor: Elena Štefancová, Ondrej Kaščák
Supervisor: Ing. Róbert Móro
Short description: Nowadays during design and usability testing of user interfaces we are more concern about overall user experience, which also includes emotions of users. Reliable detection of emotions can help us to find out if user is stressed or frustrated and reveal bottlenecks of usability. Emotions can be detected from face expressions, EEG (electroencephalogram) or with GSR (galvanic skin response).
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Impact of stress on the model of biometric characteristics of the user

Date:  November 2016
Experiment conductor: Lukáš Madzik
Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Daniela Chudá, PhD.
Short description: The issue of user modeling for his identification and the identification of the state is possible by monitoring its biometric activities: monitoring dynamic typing, using the mouse, or practice in the use of the software. Experiment with the biometric sample and the known biometric algorithms to determine the dynamic typing and mouse movement. At user testing is often under stress. Some influence of emotional states – stress the user to create and detect user model in a variety of hardware tools (keyboard, mouse). Determine the impact of stress on the user’s recognition and to recognize his emotional state.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Demonstration of eye tracking

Date:  November 2016
Experiment conductor: Márius Rak
Short description:
Seminar for subject introduction to psychology in study program cognitive science on faculty of mathematics, physics and informatics of Comenius University – demonstration of possibilities of eye tracking using modern methods. Demonstration consists of short explanation of techniques used in history of eye-tracking, based on research of Alfred Yarbus from year 1967 [1]. Participants will try bit changed experiments based on the publication.
Firstly, there will be displayed photos of human faces, later eight times display of painting Unexpected visitor, for which there will always be another task to examine eye movements. To ease off the demonstration, there will be few optical illusions. Next part of demo will consist of reading well known slovak and english text. Goal is to find out how person reads and whether there is difference between reading english and native – slovak text. Last part of demonstration is devoted to present common UX test.
In conclusion, participant will be able to look at their recording of their own eye movements and examine them using provided tools, which they will also discover. Seminar will be lead in psychological context because of basis of cognitive science.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Analysis of Reading Difficulty in Web Environment

Date:  October 2016
Experiment conductor: Štrbák Martin
Supervisor: Ing. Marián Šimko, PhD.
Short description: This project aims to capture and analyze the gaze and cognitive activity of a human reader during reading text with errors of different character, which will be intentionally added to the text. Reading is the most common form of human-computer interaction, and expansion of e-learning underlines the need for easily understandible content. The current method of analysis is the use of eye-tracking device, by measuring reading speed, and re-reading of word or whole sentence. We will extend this methodologies to capture the gaze of reader around errors in the text. Aside of eye-tracking, electroencephalogram will be used to capture cognitive load of human reader. Results will be used in further research in the field of text reading analysis.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Text reading analysis using by eyetracking data

Date:  October 2016
Experiment conductor: Mrocek Jakub
Supervisor: Ing. Róbert Móro
Short description: This project aims to capture and analyze the gaze of a human reader during reading text with errors of different character, which will be intentionally added to the text. Reading is the most common form of human-computer interaction, and expansion of e-learning underlines the need for easily understandible content. The current method of analysis is the use of eye-tracking device, by measuring reading speed, and re-reading of word or whole sentence. We will extend this methodologies to capture the gaze of reader around errors in the text. Results will be used in further research in the field of text reading analysis.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Automatic evaluating usability of applications with eye-tracking technique

Date:  October 2016
Experiment conductor: Kutlíková Lenka
Supervisor: Ing. Jakub Šimko, PhD.
Short description: During experiments and also in real life users often don’t read instructions. When they are doing experiments it can skew results and the experiment is discarded. The main goal of this experiment is to find if users read given instructions. It consists of four parts with different simple tasks. Before every part there are instructions. Tasks are well-known for people so they are able to do them also without reading them.. The first one is Brick Breaker game in which users should move the paddle horizontally to the left and to the right in order to hit the ball. The second one is non-verbal reasoning test with 10 tasks.  The third one is the crossword where users should mark only horizontal words. The last task for users is to play Snake where they should take 15 points and end the game. Results from this experiment can help researchers to identify biased results and achieve higher quality of them.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)