Spring 2015/2016

sUXess: Online usability testing tool

Date: Mai 2016
Experiment conductor: Cuprik Róbert, Dubec Peter, Gajdošík Patrik, Roba Roman, Sanyová Monika, Vrba Jakub, Žigo Tomáš
Supervisor: Ing. Róbert Móro
Short description: Nowadays online usability testing becomes more and more popular and it enables us to perform usability testing without need of specialized laboratories and feedback from users is collected thanks to recording of user’s activity and with use of different questionnaires. With use of online usability testing we are able to decrease expenses and also to involve more users in usability testing. However the main problem of online usability testing is missing detailed monitoring of users.

There is great potential in combination of classic and online UX testing. It is possible to obtain detailed data about user’s behaviour with use of eye tracking, which allows us to rapidly increase level of online UX testing. We have created platform for online UX testing, which allows users to test web pages in different stages of development cycle.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Usability of comprehensive visualization software for medical purposes

Date: Mai 2016
Experiment conductor: Bc. Peter Šutarík
Supervisor: Ing. Vanda Benešová, PhD
Short description: The main theme of my diploma thesis is testing and usability evaluation for medical software. Based on results of the testing the new prototype will be designed, which will reduce or remove issues that have been revealed. Finally, we provide comparison of the two interfaces based on metrics.
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)

Universal tool to asign badges in online communities

Date: April 2016
Experiment conductor: Martina Redajová
Supervisor: Ing. Ivan Srba
Short description:The application of gamification is becoming a widely used technique of an activity motivation not only in learning process in educational domains, but also in other domains with no such purpose. The main goal of various gamification mechanics is to motivate users to visit a system, be active in this system and to have another reason to come back regularly. There are many types of game elements used to achieved this, such as leaderboards, storytelling, achievements and application of levels or badges. Assigning badges is one of the most promising elements of gamification because it is rewarding users for their activity with no need of permanent focus on progress. It is proven that user’s ambition to earn a badge is provided by natural human desire of owning something. However, choosing right activities to be rewarded for and correct definitions of activity boundaries to assign badges, seems to be often a problem for web domains creators and there is just a few tools developed to solve this problem. In our work, we are going to create a front-end for a universal tool for assigning badges focusing on creating correct rules for assigning badges and creating design of these badges. Correct choice of activities users should be rewarded for and correct definition of boundaries for assigning certain badges will be supported by specifically proposed visualization of users’ activities, which will be provided by our tool.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Automatic evaluating usability of applications with eye-tracking technique

Date: April 2016
Experiment conductor: Lenka Kutlíková
Supervisor: Ing. Jakub Šimko, PhD
Short description: Users often don’t read instructions. When they are doing experiments it can skew results and the experiment can be discarded. Our experiment consists of some short parts with different simple tasks. Tasks are known for people so they are able to do them also without instructions. One of them is replication of experiment conducted in our university this year – Big Five personality form. Another one is Brick Destroyer game. The last one is non-verbal reasoning test. All three parts have edited instructions or rules and we want to test if participants of experiment read given instructions. 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)

Innovative UI for internet banking 

Date: April 2016
Experiment conductor: Andrej Lenčucha
Supervisor: Ing. Richard Sládek, pedagogic supervisor: Mgr. Alena Kovárová, PhD.
Short description: Many business applications and intranet applications suffer bad user experience. To achieve the best possible experience, the user-centric approach should be considered in every project phase. The most important phase is analysis. The project focuses on delivering best UX in collaboration with project management. The demo applications are CRM intranet system and services for internet banking. 3-5 test participants are expected. The test will include questionnaire about what the users of internet and mobile banking applications expects, the most secure and most comfortable authentication methods. The test should also utilize card sorting test to help organize structure of the application. Results will be part of diploma thesis to support scientific approach in designing user interfaces.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Obtaining implicit feedback throughtout control devices

Date: April 2016
Experiment conductor: Tomáš Repiský
Supervisor: Ing. Peter Krátky
Short description: As our thesis is mainly focused on implicit feedback, this experiment will be focused on collecting data from mouse. User’s behaviour will be obsevrved during fifteen minute session of reading and browsing in self developed news portal. User will be asked to do two types of action during the browsing part. Main aim of this experiment is to obtain characteristic patters of movements, scrolling and positioning of mouse, so we can analyze the connection between these characteristics and user’s behaviour. As an extended measure to this data, we will use eye tracker device to track user’s gaze while doing tasks mentioned. As these data are not purely implicit, it can be used as a trustful source in process of evaluation.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Influence of tasks on visual attention in visualizations

Date: April – May 2016
Experiment conductor: Patrik Polatsek
Supervisor: Ing. Vanda Benešová, PhD.
Short description: Visual attention is influenced by salient stimuli as well as by goals, prior knowledge, expectations and tasks. This project focuses on the effect of a task on visual attention by viewing of visualizations. The aim is to find the most viewed regions and specific patterns of eye movements. The another goal is to find regions that attract the attention regardless of a given task. Using the results of the experiment, the influence of a given task on a sequence of fixations and saccades will be evaluated. The results will be also used to design a visual attention model to predict attention in visualizations using salient stimuli such as intensity, color and orientation as well as using low-level tasks.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Analysis of Reading Difficulty in Web Environment

Date: March-April 2016
Experiment conductor: Jakub Mrocek, Martin Štrbák
Supervisor: Ing. Róbert Móro, 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)

An Impact of Biometrics for Modeling UX with IDE

Date: March 2016
Experiment conductor: Ján Šmihla
Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Daniela Chudá, PhD.
Short description: Identification of user skills and experiences is possible based on his biometrics – how to use the mouse, keyboard and his eye gaze. In this experiment we will measure the user experiences with Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Participants will receive a list of simple tasks for our measurement of the dynamics of writing, mouse movements, mouse clicks, and the gaze. Firstly, the participant will do questionnaire about their experiences, which should help us to collect some data how skilled they really are. The goal is to collect enough data for each participant (keyboard, mouse, gaze) for continue work with modeling the user and choosing the appropriate classification characteristics and methods.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Identification of Important Parts in the Source Code by Using Eye Tracking of a Programmer

Date: March 2016
Experiment conductor: Barbora Pavlíková
Supervisor: Martin Konôpka
Short description: Eye tracking finds its use in various research areas. Except of the usability studies, we can find it in psychology or user studies. Apart of that, it is also popular in studies of eye movements in programming. Many of such works are about reading a code fragments by programmers of various experience or about searching for links between source code elements. In programming we are looking at various parts of source code and those which we are paying attention to the most are kind of important for us. The word important means different things to everyone. It could be a part of code which contains main or difficult logic, or something that is hard to understand for us. In our work we are trying to identify these difficult parts in code only through tracking a programmer’s gaze. The difference from other studies is tracking gaze during programming so we are recording the whole process of creating code. This information could be then used in several ways. A team leader would be able to define weaknesses of his employee and arrange on improving his skills. Another use may be found in programming education. Tracking students during work on their tasks would be helpful to understand which sections are problematics for them so teachers would be able to adapt lessons according to the results.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Learning Video Representations for Generating Descriptions

Date: March 2016
Experiment conductor: Patrik Gajdošík
Supervisor: Márius Šajgalík
Short description: During UX testing in UX Class or in UX Lab, a huge amount of data is generated. This data contains useful information, like a repeating patterns, that could be used to better understand the behaviour of users during their work with applications (mainly the Web). One of the approaches to extract this information out of the datasets is to use neural networks. Nowadays, big variety of different architectures of neural network exists which could be used. The goal of our project is to analyze the existing architectures of neural networks and to build our own architecture (a module) that would merge/combine the work already done in this field and to apply it on the UX datasets created as a part of the projects done at ÚISI.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Analysis of User Activities in Web Browser

Date: March 2016
Experiment conductor: Mário Hunka
Supervisor: Martin Labaj
Short description: Parallel browsing is matter of course nowadays. The increasing use of tabs caused that management can be a problem for user and computer as well. Thats why its important to better understand user behavior and somehow optimalize and make the web browsing more effective. In our experiment, we will collect data for analysis. In this analysis, we will focus on the pages that were opened on a new tab, but never visited – so they are pointless. By eliminating this problem we can possibly speed up tabbed browsing. Of course, we will monitor if it has something in common with the using of mouse and keyboard. Finally, we want to propose an improvement or a feature that will ease web browsing.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Collecting EEG Data with P300 Speller

Date: March 2016
Experiment conductor: Patrik Berger
Supervisor: Róbert Móro
Short description: Our goal is to implement successful signal processing and P300 ERP classifying algorithm. We carry out an experiment in which we use EEG Epoc Emotiv device to collect data from participants using P300 speller application. We will use collected data to find out how accurate our algorithm is and furthermore, whether the data from Emotiv Epoc is good enough for detecting ERP like P300. Finally, we will compare accuracy of our algorithm with recent studies in this area and evaluate the results.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Music Watching Experiment for Emotion Detection using EPOC EEG Device

Date: March 2016
Experiment conductor: Tomáš Matlovič
Supervisor: Róbert Móro
Short description: We use EEG Epoc Emotiv device to collect data from participants while watching music videos. Music videos are chosen to evoke specific emotions. We use machine learning algorithms and try to classify those emotions. We plan to compare the accuracy of those algorithms and also with the method which comes with the Epoc Emotiv device. At the end, we will evaluate usability of an EEG Epoc device in measuring emotions by comparing its accuracy with FaceReader device.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Pupillary Response Experiment to Filters­-out the Luminosity Noise

Date: March 2016
Experiment conductor: Tomáš Juhaniak
Supervisor: prof. Ing. Mária Bieliková, PhD.
Short description: Information about cognitive load of a user can be very useful for appropriate system adaptation and personalization, especially if they can be measured in real time. As was shown by previous research, human cognitive load is reflected by pupillary response, measurable by eye­tracking devices. However, practical exploitation of this phenomenon (e.g. in adaptive systems or user studies) has been limited due to other factors that influence pupillary dilatation, namely changing luminosity of device screen. In this experiment, we conduct experiments with a pupillary response to filters­-out the luminosity noise caused by changing screen content. We show stimuli with different colors and structure and measure pupil dilation relative to these stimuli.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Congnitive Load, Visual Search, and Deception Detection

Date: February 2016
Experiment conductor: Tomáš Juhaniak, Mária Dragúnová, Metod Rybár
Supervisor: prof. Ing. Mária Bieliková, PhD.
Short description: We are collecting eye-tracking data from users, who are accomplishing visual search tasks, filling out online questionnaires and watching changing colors on screens. These data will be analyzed in couple of separate ways. First, we will use the data to find out, if we can standardize information from eyetracker about pupil and if so, this data will be used for pupil calibration and to differentiate between cognitive load changes and luminosity changes. Next, we use data from visual search to establish, if there is a link between visual search skills and speed of search of elements in web application. Last use of data will be to confirm hypothesis formerly confirmed in another experiment done in UX Lab, that we can create an automatic model of user deception in online questionnaires using mainly eye-tracker data.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Automation of Analysing Data from Usability Study with Eye-tracking

Date: February  2016
Experiment conductor: Vladimír Ľalík
Supervisor: Jakub Šimko
Short description: Usability of web interface is important because nowadays users are demanding of quality. Usability testing with gaze-tracking give us insight into user behaviour, but also give us a lot of data for analyzing.  Analyses of this data is usually qualitative and also can be affected by individual character of researcher. We provide method which try to automatically identify usability problems of websites from data gained through usability testing. Our method is based on relationship between metrics and patterns in eye-tracking data and specific usability problems.  The purpose of experiment is to prove our method for automated analyses. We prepared two different versions of tasks with different usability problems.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)

Personal Characteristics Links to Eye Movements

Date: February  2016
Experiment conductor: Metod Rybár, Viktor Svetský
Supervisor: prof. Ing. Mária Bieliková, PhD.
Short description: We are collecting eye-tracking data from users filling out psychological personality questionnaire. These questionnaires will be evaluated and linked with eye-tracking metrics to find out, if there are links between eye-movements and personalities characteristics. Questionnaires will be also evaluated as truthful or deceptive using psychological standard methods, and data from eye-trackers will be used to confirm links between implicit user feedback and deception.
Link to a formal description of the UX experiment: experiment description (In Slovak)