Recursos

El comercio electrónico se presenta en la sociedad costarricense como una nueva forma de realizar negocios, como una estrategia de las compañías para mantener competitividad y como forma de mostrarse y expanderse a través de todo el mundo. Sin embargo, como todo proceso nuevo, el e-commerce trae con sigo transformaciones y temores que se deben superar. Esta bien un cambio cultural y requiere, sin duda, un proceso de educación para lograr incorporarlo en la cotidianeidad. Requiere además cambios en el aparato legal, económico y social de nuestra sociedad. Este trabajo presenta algunos de los factores que se deben superar y algunos beneficios que el comercio electrónico puede traer a nuestra sociedad.

While user experience assessment enables understanding users' perception about a product, limitations have been encountered when elders use questionnaires to evaluate user experience. In this paper we present the design process of Aestimo, a tangible interface to assist elderly people when evaluating the user experience of interactive prototypes. Our prototype is a simplification of the AttrakDiff questionnaire, which gives a chance to record one's overall opinion (i.e., speech) and emotions. In addition, our design uses playful interaction styles that are familiar to the elderly. In a preliminary evaluation, elderly found Aestimo entertaining and easy to use. As future work, we aim to explore new materials in building Aestimo and to perform a comprehensive evaluation with several elders.

Affective computing has focused on emotion acquisition using techniques of objective (sensors, facial recognition, physiological signals) and subjective measurement (self-report). Each technique has advantages and drawbacks, and a combination of the information generated from each could provide systems more balanced and accurate information about user emotions. However, there are several benefits to self-reporting emotions, over objective techniques: the collected information may be more precise and it is less intrusive to determine. This systematic literature review focuses on analyzing which technologies have been proposed to conduct subjective measurements of emotions through self-report. We aim to understand the state of the art regarding the features of interfaces for emotional self-report, identify the context for which they were designed, and describe several other aspects of the technologies. A SLR was conducted, resulting in 18 selected papers, 13 of which satisfied the inclusion criteria. We identified most existing systems use graphical user interfaces, and there are very few proposals that use tangible user interfaces to self-report emotional information, which may be an opportunity to design novel interfaces, especially for populations with low digital skills, e.g. older adults.

Publicado en revista Panorama Académico

Research on physical representations of data has often used personal data as its focus. Core aim of making personal data physical is to provoke self-reflections through a felt experience. In this paper, we present a preliminary study which employs the idea of gift-giving as a means to explore one's online data. Our main findings report strategies of relating to the data of strangers as well as a conflict between what one thought of their online self and what others were able to find. We discuss how the gifts became platforms for self-reflection, similar to physical data models. Then, we connect that to the engagement of a third person (gift-giver) in the process, highlighting the potential of such involvement. In the future, we focus on how to link people's meaningful artifacts with their personal data.

The aim of this article is to expose how the topic of usability in the course Multimedia, which is part of the Business program imparted by Universidad de Costa Rica in Western Campus at Grecia location. The study took place on I semester 2011 and it used the teaching strategy called case study, where students had to design an Internet shopping cart graphical user interface for a specific user type. Before making the design, students characterized the selected users and then they had to assess the usability of the final design. The results of the evaluation of the design of the interface by the selected users reflected that people improved with respect to the usability of the application, since 81.25% of the designs received a positive assessment from users. To determine if students assimilated usability issues, a survey based on the technique of Learning Curve was applied. The results indicated that students scored 9.07% on the question of expertise with the topic of usability, after making the case study.

Publicado en revista Panorama Académico