Touchable Holographic Solutions (THS) are an application type in Augmented and Mixed Reality (AR/MR) environments. Evaluating THS requires considering Usability and User eXperience (UX), particularly Immersion and Presence, often overlooked by current methods. A systematic mapping study and exploratory search revealed gaps, such as the lack of a unified instrument for THS usability and UX evaluation, methods that address THS-specific aspects, and challenges in adapting general evaluation technologies. To bridge these gaps, we present the Usability and User Experience Evaluation in Touchable Holograms (UUXE-ToH) questionnaire, with 67 Likert scale items and three open-ended questions. A validation study with 13 experts provided quantitative data and qualitative feedback. Results confirm the UUXE-ToH’s efficacy and offer insights for improvement. This research contributes to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) by introducing a validated tool for evaluating THS, integrating hedonic and pragmatic aspects, and supporting early problem identification in development, accessible to professionals with diverse UX expertise.

This research to practice full paper observed that graduate subjects (or courses) are commonly offered in graduate programs and can provide specialized knowledge of different topics that are important for the formation of Ph.D. and Master’s students. At the same time, Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been increasingly adopted in the computing area as a research method to synthesize the state of the art of a given research topic, identify research groups working on that topic, understand the existing limitations and research gaps, and also identify new research directions. However, it is still not well understood the real benefits and challenges of offering a subject that addresses SLR for graduate students. Moreover, it is not known the difficulties faced by professors (i.e., educators) to teach this subject. The main goal of this paper is to present an experience report of teaching SLR, in particular, the benefits and challenges of this subject for computer science graduate students. In addition, this paper also presents the essential topics of SLR that we recommend to be taught and a better way to teach them, aiming at supporting graduate courses to offer it. For this, we surveyed computer science graduate students who attended the SLR subject that was taught for almost ten years in our institutions. In particular, we collected the lessons learned, findings, and insights; following, we summarized the benefits and challenges for students, the difficulties for professors, and also those essential topics to be taught. As a main result, the SLR subject can be considered a valuable opportunity for graduate students that could use this subject to conduct the required deep literature review of their research topic and have a better comprehension of their research area. Besides and more importantly, this subject can improve important research skills of students, including the ability to recognize research problems, analyze and synthesize data, think critically, and write papers. Therefore, we believe that graduate courses should analyze the possibility of offering the SLR subject.

Natural user interface (NUI) is considered a recent topic in human–computer interaction (HCI) and provides innovative forms of interaction, which are performed through natural movements of the human body like gestures, voice, and gaze. In the software development process, usability and user eXperience (UX) evaluations are a relevant step, since they evaluate several aspects of the system, such as efficiency, effectiveness, user satisfaction, and immersion. Thus, the goal of the authors’ systematic mapping study (SMS) is to identify usability and UX evaluation technologies used by researchers and developers in software with NUIs. Their SMS selected 56 papers containing evaluation technologies for NUI. Overall, the authors identified 30 different usability and UX evaluation technologies for NUI. The analysis of these technologies reveals most of them are used to evaluate software in general, without considering the specificities of NUI. Besides, most technologies evaluate only one aspect, Usability or UX. In other words, these technologies do not consider Usability and UX together. For future work, they intend to develop an evaluation technology for NUIs that fills the gaps identified in their SMS and combining Usability and UX.

The development of systems with different features becomes increasingly challenging, given the actual context, implying on the search for new approaches for requirements elicitation. One of these approaches is design thinking (DT), a process of encouraging innovation used by designers, which presents itself as fundamental in the success of new products. This scenario motivates the importance of knowing DT concepts and their techniques, which can support requirements elicitation. In this context, the authors present DTA4RE (DT assistant for requirements elicitation), a tool that suggests DT techniques for requirements elicitation, which can be used by both students and professionals who would like to adopt DT in their projects. The DTA4RE is composed of a set of 27 techniques that could be suggested to the user through a recommendation questionnaire as well as an open repository with material to support the application of these techniques. Results from the authors’ two empirical studies with software engineering undergraduate and graduate students and industry professionals indicate that DTA4RE has helped in the selection of and in the learning of DT techniques when considering real problems. Most participants considered the questions from the recommendation questionnaire easy to answer, and the techniques suggested by the tool useful.

Requirements communication is essential in software development projects since customer needs must be communicated to the development team clearly and effectively. Although the use case (UC) specifications are used to communicate requirements in detail, developers do not always follow them. This study presents an empirical study carried out to understand the reasons why developers do not follow UC specifications and their difficulties using UC specifications in generating prototypes. Results show that the four reasons why developers fail to follow UC specifications are the existence of specification errors, ambiguous information, lack of detailed specification, or incomplete information, and due to improvement suggestions. Also, the specification defects types that impacted prototypes creation the most were an omission, ambiguity, and incorrect fact. The authors noted that 6 out of 25 (24%) defects in the UC specifications caused discrepancies in prototypes, 12 (48%) were corrected during the prototypes creation, and 7 (28%) were not propagated to the prototypes.

User experience (UX) is a quality aspect of an application that considers the emotions evoked by the system.There are several types of UX evaluation methods, such as scales, interviews, user monitoring, among others methods.However, there is still not enough information regarding if and in which contexts these methods are more suitable.This paper focuses on finding more information about the feasibility of applying scaletype methods for the UX evaluation in interactive systems.Thus, we carried out a UX evaluation on the Edmodo educational mobile application employing two scale-type methods: AttrakDiff and Hedonic Utility Scale.These methods were chosen after a selection process applying inclusion and exclusion criteria.The results indicate that it is possible to evaluate the quality of an application at a low cost.However, it is necessary to adapt these methods to provide a more complete report of the UX, allowing users to subjectively report their experiences and, consequently, identify the issues that affected the UX.

Software organizations need to increase their productivity to stay competitive.Although there is a lot of research on productivity in software development, software organizations still do not know what are the most significant productivity factors in which they should invest.This paper presents a Tertiary Literature Review (TLR) that aimed to identify and analyze Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) on the influence factors of software productivity reported in the scientific literature.We extracted and classified the influence factors into organizational factors (organizational dependent factors) and human factors (people dependent factors).Using this information, software organizations can improve the productivity of their projects by evaluating the influence factors that best fit their context.

Software organizations need to increase their productivity to stay competitive. Although there is a lot of research on productivity in software development, software organizations still do not know what are the most significant productivity factors in which they should invest. This paper presents a Tertiary Literature Review (TLR) that aims to identify and analyze Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) on the influence factors of software productivity reported in the scientific literature. We extracted and classified the influence factors into organizational factors (organizational-dependent factors) and human factors (people-dependent factors). The relevance of the factors was extracted according to the amount of references found in the secondary studies. Using this information, software organizations can improve the productivity of their projects by evaluating the influence factors that best fit their context.

A Use Case Model is composed of use cases that describe software functionalities through Use Case Specifications. The evaluation of the specifications that compose such a model can allow for an early identification of usability defects. We previously proposed MIT 1-Model Inspection Technique for Usability Evaluation that aims to support the identification of usability defects through the evaluation of use cases specifications. In this paper, we present the evaluation of this technique through a controlled experiment that measured its efficiency, effectiveness, perceived ease of use, and perceived usefulness when compared to the Use Case Evaluation (UCE) method. Our quantitative findings indicate that MIT 1 allows users to find more usability defects in less time than UCE. However, UCE was considered easiest to use and more useful than MIT 1, highlighting improvement needs for MIT 1.

Usability inspections can be employed in early phases of the software development process.They improve usability through artifacts that are built during the development of the software.These artifacts will influence the usability of the developed software.Usability inspection techniques have been proposed and considered as an effective alternative for addressing usability issues in early phases.However, these techniques are often avoided by software engineers due to their lack of experience and knowledge in the field.Therefore, there is an opportunity to investigate how industry practitioners have employed an early usability inspection technique in practice.This paper describes an observational study in the industry aimed at eliciting the process used by software engineers when applying an early usability inspection technique.We analyzed the qualitative data, discussing their impact in the improvement of the technique.The results indicated which steps the software engineers adopted in the technique's application.