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Title:
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OFFICE AUTOMATION USER INTERFACE AND USABILITY: A CASE STUDY |
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Author(s):
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Luigi Colazzo , Andrea Molinari , Sara Tomasini |
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ISBN:
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978-972-8924-55-3 |
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Editors:
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Piet Kommers and Pedro Isaías |
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Year:
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2008 |
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Edition:
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Single |
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Keywords:
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Usability, Human Computer Interaction, Office automation, Evaluation techniques, Retraining costs. |
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Type:
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Full Paper |
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First Page:
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171 |
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Last Page:
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178 |
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Language:
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English |
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Cover:
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Full Contents:
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click to dowload 
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Paper Abstract:
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The paper presents an analysis of the evolution of the user interface in Office automation applications, from the WIMP
interface to the novelties presented in latest version of Microsoft Office user interface. In particular, due to huge
number of users, the novelty of the approach/interface and consequent impact of our daily work, we concentrated the
research and experimentation on Microsoft Office 2007 new user interface by using some evaluation techniques. The
results are based on experimentation on a sample of 15 users of two main Office suite products: Microsoft Word and
Microsoft Excel. We present the new user interface of Office 2007 with the objective of analyzing some usability
aspects. In the end we draw some hypothesis about the impacts of new user interface on final users by comparing some
variables. We noticed that users with a higher familiarity on the traditional interface experienced more difficulties to
perform tasks, while users with less familiarity experienced fewer difficulties. The problem is more perceptible when
interaction style is completely different from the traditional one. This critical state regards mainly habitual users that
experiment more difficulties to perform tasks than new users. This paper could be a first step for a further study on the
impact of the new user interface in a different scenario, i.e. public authority or public services: we discuss some initial
hypothesis about that impact. |
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