Special issue on “Augmenting Usability Evaluation”

 +++ Submission Deadline: March 31, 2023 +++

Special Issue on “Augmenting Usability Evaluation”

There exist many guidelines, norms, and standards on how a user interface can be evaluated traditionally within the field of Human-Computer Interaction. However, the evaluation itself is still to be executed by humans. This can be a tedious, erroneous, lengthy, and expensive task. Furthermore, the results can vary depending on the executing expert. Therefore, this important stage in the development of interactive applications is often shortened or omitted altogether. It is desirable to both support and streamline the evaluation of the usability of an application. The support may or may not replace the human in the loop. It is expected that in most cases, humans will still have the last word when it comes to classifying and judging the results of the support. Hence a full automatization is a topic of the future, currently we look forward to many ways of an augmentation of the evaluation process in usability engineering.

For this special issue we invite contributions in the field of augmenting usability evaluation that are unique, thought-provoking, and impactful.

Topics of Interest

Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Formalizing Usability knowledge, from e.g., ISO 9241, WCAG
  • Formally checking user interfaces 
  • Evaluating screen-recordings by way of image recognition techniques
  • Evaluating existing implementation code of an application to derive a formal model which in turn can be formally evaluated
  • Evaluating the design of prototypes/user interfaces and assessing various properties about their usability
  • Evaluating the usability of other means of interactions e.g., voice interfaces are by design tightly structured, potentially offering an easier approach to formal evaluation
  • Guidelines and novel evaluation approaches for Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality user interfaces

We welcome any contributions that address one or more of these, as well as related issues to the above topics.

Timeline

31.03.2023: Submission deadline for articles

05.05.2023: Notifications: accept, revise or reject
03.06.2023: Resubmission deadline for accepted and revised papers 
17.06.2023: Final Decisions
July 2023: Publication of the special issue

Submission and Review Process

All submissions will undergo a single-blind peer review process: Each manuscript will be reviewed by 3 independent expert reviewers. Possible outcomes of the first round of reviews are: accept, revise, or reject. Authors of submissions that require revision must implement the required changes until June 3, 2023.

Anonymized manuscripts need to be submitted via ScholarOne. The anticipated length of articles for this special issue is about 7.000 – 10.000 words. The length of the manuscript should be proportional to its contribution. Templates for preparing submissions can be accessed below.

Accepted articles will be published in the Journal of Interactive Media (i-com). i-com is indexed by the major scientific indices. Scopus CiteScore has reached 2,0 for i-com articles in 2021. In 2023, I-com will finish its transition to a Full Open Access journal – so, the publications will be available Open Access.

Link to Submission System: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/icom

Link to Templates and Author Information: https://i-com-journal.org/links-downloads/

Guest Editors