A growing area of research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human Robotic Interaction (HRI) is the development of haptic-based user performance testing. User performance testing Usability forms a vital part of these test objectives. As a result, diverse usability methods/strategies and test features are being employed. Apparently, with the robustness of haptic-based user performance testing features, user performance still has challenges. With this regard, it is vital to identify the direction and effectiveness of these methods/strategies and test features, and improvements required in the test objectives and evaluation. This chapter seeks to investigate the challenges of user performance and the user performance indicators in some HCI and HRI researches involving haptic-based test, as well as presents a User Performance Indicator Tool (UPIT) as a test validation tool to aid designers/testers in enhancing their user performance test and test evaluation outcomes.
TopIntroduction
The field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human Robot Interaction (HRI) is growing with usability studies. Testing usability and user performance are two dimensions that have received major attention. Usability strategies can either be user-centred or usage-centred and are widely employed in haptic-based user performance testing, yet usability and user performance still remains a challenge. Knowingly or unknowingly, the amount of user-centred and usage-centred strategies employed in a haptic-based user performance testing tends to have a great impact on user performance and overall usability. Regardless of the robustness of the interface features and user pre-trial/pre-test/training/background test strategy employed, user performance challenges and interface usability shortcomings in several haptic-based user performance testing outcomes have been identified. This may be as a result of the diverse usability strategies being employed in such tests, which in most cases have contextual objectives.
The Quality in Use Integrated Measurement (QUIM) (Seffah et al, 2006) presents a consolidated model with ten usability factors for software usage, including efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, satisfaction, learnability, safety, trustfulness, accessibility, universality and usefulness. QUIM (Seffah et al, 2006) includes feedback as one of its usability criteria and describes it as the responsiveness of the software products to user inputs or events in a meaningful way. Feedback in haptic-based user performance testing is more virtual presence-context unlike general software, websites and general touch display devices. The System Usability Scale (SUS) reveals that increase in user ‘s product experience results in higher SUS (McLellan et al., 2012). The MUSiC performance measurement method (Macleod, 1997) focuses on task performance usability for prototyping and iterative improvement in development processes. This method presents effectiveness and efficiency as key performance measures, and relative user efficiency, productivity, and snag, search and help action times as optional performance measures. The User Centred Design Process aims to improve user experience in website developments (Usability.gov, 2015). The Logical User-Centered Interaction Design (LUCID) framework (Kreitzberg, 1998) defines a context in which to conduct product, user interface design and usability activities, as well as provides background and tools required to manage those activities. The Haptic-Audio-Visual (HAV) system architecture (Jia et al, 2013) presents a user capability evaluation method for virtual training systems. While these efforts show prospects for aiding haptic-based user performance testing processes the unique feedback feature of haptic-based user performance testing requires a more universal usability strategy for better haptic interface design, implementation and user performance outcomes.