Morten Hertzum
Has also published under the name of:
"M. Hertzum"
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Publications by Morten Hertzum (bibliography)
» 2009 «
Frandsen-Thorlacius, Olaf, Hornbæk, Kasper, Hertzum, Morten and Clemmensen, Torkil (2009): Non-universal usability?: a survey of how usability is understood by Chinese and Danish users. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 41-50. Available online
“Most research assumes that usability is understood similarly by users in different cultures, implying that the notion of usability, its aspects, and their interrelations are constant across cultures. The present study shows that this is not the case for a sample of 412 users from China and Denmark, who differ in how they understand and prioritize different aspects of usability. Chinese users appear to be more concerned with visual appearance, satisfaction, and fun than Danish users; Danish users prioritize effectiveness, efficiency, and lack of frustration higher than Chinese users. The results suggest that culture influences perceptions of usability. We discuss implications for usability research and for usability practice.”
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Granlien, Maren Sander and Hertzum, Morten (2009): Implementing new ways of working: interventions and their effect on the use of an electronic medication record. In: GROUP09 - International Conference on Supporting Group Work 2009. pp. 321-330. Available online
“Successful deployment of information technology (IT) involves implementation of new ways of working. Under-recognition of this organizational element of implementation entails considerable risk of not attaining the benefits that motivated deployment, yet knowledge of how to work systematically with organizational implementation is sparse. This study investigates a set of interventions undertaken to implement one mandated procedure associated with an electronic medication record, namely that all information about medication is recorded in the system. Medical record audits show that the interventions, which were devised and performed as part of the study, significantly lowered the number of records that violated the procedure. This positive effect was, however, not achieved until multiple interventions had been employed, and there is some indication that the effect may be wearing off after the interventions have ended. We discuss the implications of these results for efforts to work systematically with the organizational implementation of IT systems.”
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» 2007 «
Hertzum, Morten and Hornbæk, Kasper (2007): Input techniques that dynamically change their cursor activation area: A comparison of bubble and cell cursors. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 65 (10) pp. 833-851
“Efficient pointing is crucial to graphical user interfaces, and input techniques that dynamically change their activation area may yield improvements over point cursors by making objects selectable at a distance. Input techniques that dynamically change their activation area include the bubble cursor, whose activation area always contains the closest object, and two variants of cell cursors, whose activation areas contain a set of objects in the vicinity of the cursor. We report two experiments that compare these techniques to a point cursor; in one experiment participants use a touchpad for operating the input techniques, in the other a mouse. In both experiments, the bubble cursor is fastest and participants make fewer errors with it. Participants also unanimously prefer this technique. For small targets, the cell cursors are generally more accurate than the point cursor; in the second experiment the box cursor is also faster. The cell cursors succeed in letting participants select objects while the cursor is far away from the target, but are relatively slow in the final phase of target acquisition. We discuss limitations and possible enhancements of input techniques with activation areas that contain multiple objects.”
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Hertzum, Morten, Clemmensen, Torkil, Hornbæk, Kasper, Kumar, Jyoti, Shi, Qingxin and Yammiyavar, Pradeep (2007): Usability Constructs: A Cross-Cultural Study of How Users and Developers Experience Their Use of Information Systems. In: Aykin, Nuray M. (ed.) UI-HCII 2007 - Second International Conference on Usability and Internationalization - Part I July 22-27, 2007, Beijing, China. pp. 317-326. Available online
» 2006 «
Hertzum, Morten (2006): Minimal-feedback hints for remembering passwords. In Interactions, 13 (3) pp. 38-40
Hertzum, Morten (2006): Problem Prioritization in Usability Evaluation: From Severity Assessments Toward Impact on Design. In International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 21 (2) pp. 125-146
“Severity assessments enable prioritization of problems encountered during usability evaluations, and thereby provide a device for guiding the utilization of design resources. However, designers' response to usability evaluations is also influenced by other factors, which may overshadow severity. With the purpose of enhancing the impact of severity assessments, this study combines a field study of factors that influence the impact of evaluations with an experimental study of severity assessments made during usability inspections. The results show that even in a project receptive to input from evaluations, their impact was highly dependent on conducting evaluations early. This accorded with an informal method that blended elements of usability evaluation and participatory design and could be extended with user-made severity assessments. The major cost associated with the evaluations was not finding but fixing problems, emphasizing that, to be effective, severity assessments must be reliable, valid, and sufficiently persuasive to justify the cost of fixing problems. For the usability inspections, evaluators' ratings of problem impact and persistence were weakly correlated with the number of evaluators reporting a problem, indicating that different evaluators represent different subgroups of users or alternatively that evaluator-made severity assessments are of questionable reliability. To call designers' attention to the severe problems, the halving of the severity sum is proposed as a means of visualizing the large payoff of fixing a high-severity problem and, conversely, the modest potential of spending resources on low-severity problems.”
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» 2005 «
Nilsson, Magnus and Hertzum, Morten (2005): Negotiated rhythms of mobile work: time, place, and work schedules. In: GROUP05: International Conference on Supporting Group Work November 6-9, 2005, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp. 148-157. Available online
“This study investigates the role of rhythms in the collaborative coordination of mobile work as well as in the individual actors\' comprehension and command of their work. Drawing on an ethnographic study of home-care work, we examine the ways in which temporal regularities or rhythms are formed and reinforced. Further, we analyse how the major temporal rhythms are configured and furnished by individual, collective, and social rhythms, and how these rhythms contribute to the collaborative flow of activities. Finally, we discuss how the concept of rhythms adds to an understanding of alignment and coordination in mobile and distributed work settings.”
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Bjorn, Pernille and Hertzum, Morten (2005): Proactive behaviour may lead to failure in virtual project-based collaborative learning. In: GROUP05: International Conference on Supporting Group Work November 6-9, 2005, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. pp. 326-327. Available online
“This paper argues that proactive behaviour, caused by high engagement and motivation of the learners, may lead to failure of collaborative learning. By examining empirical data from real-world text-only virtual negotiations between dispersed participants engaged in project-based collaborative learning, we discover that volunteering self-initiated activities promotes the participants\' individualistic behaviour. Also, the technology made it easy for participants to include their own statements in new contributions and deconstruct the statements of others, permitting few opportunities for others to influence proposals.”
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» 2004 «
Hertzum, Morten and Simonsen, Jesper (2004): Evidence-based development: a viable approach?. In: Proceedings of the Third Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction October 23-27, 2004, Tampere, Finland. pp. 385-388. Available online
“Systems development is replete with projects that represent substantial resource investments but result in systems that fail to meet users' needs. Evidence-based development is an emerging idea intended to provide means for managing customer-vendor relationships and working systematically toward meeting customer needs. We are suggesting that the effects of the use of a system should play a prominent role in the contractual definition of IT projects and that contract fulfilment should be determined on the basis of evidence of these effects. Based on two ongoing studies of home-care management and electronic patient records for diabetes patients, this paper reports research in progress regarding the prospects and pitfalls of evidence-based development.”
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Hertzum, Morten (2004): Small-Scale Classification Schemes: A Field Study of Requirements Engineering. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 13 (1) pp. 35-61
“Small-scale classification schemes are used extensively in the coordination of cooperative work. This study investigates the creation and use of a classification scheme for handling the system requirements during the redevelopment of a nation-wide information system. This requirements classification inherited a lot of its structure from the existing system and rendered requirements that transcended the framework laid out by the existing system almost invisible. As a result, the requirements classification became a defining element of the requirements-engineering process, though its main effects remained largely implicit. The requirements classification contributed to constraining the requirements-engineering process by supporting the software engineers in maintaining some level of control over the process. This way, the requirements classification provided the software engineers with an important means of discretely balancing the contractual aspect of requirements engineering against facilitating the users in an open-ended search for their system requirements. The requirements classification is analysed in terms of the complementary concepts of boundary objects and coordination mechanisms. While coordination mechanisms focus on how classification schemes enable cooperation among people pursuing a common goal, boundary objects embrace the implicit consequences of classification schemes in situations involving conflicting goals. Moreover, the requirements specification focused on functional requirements and provided little information about why these requirements were considered relevant. This stands in contrast to the discussions at the project meetings where the software engineers made frequent use of both abstract goal descriptions and concrete examples to make sense of the requirements. This difference between the written requirements specification and the oral discussions at the meetings may help explain software engineers' general preference for people, rather than documents, as their information sources.”
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» 2003 «
Hertzum, Morten and Jacobsen, Niels Ebbe (2003): The Evaluator Effect: A Chilling Fact About Usability Evaluation Methods. In International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 15 (1) pp. 183-204
“Computer professionals have a need for robust, easy-to-use usability
evaluation methods (UEMs) to help them systematically improve the usability of
computer artifacts. However, cognitive walkthrough (CW), heuristic evaluation
(HE), and thinking-aloud study (TA)-3 of the most widely used UEMs-suffer from
a substantial evaluator effect in that multiple evaluators evaluating the same
interface with the same UEM detect markedly different sets of problems. A
review of 11 studies of these 3 UEMs reveals that the evaluator effect exists
for both novice and experienced evaluators, for both cosmetic and severe
problems, for both problem detection and severity assessment, and for
evaluations of both simple and complex systems. The average agreement between
any 2 evaluators who have evaluated the same system using the same UEM ranges”
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Hertzum, Morten (2003): Making use of scenarios: a field study of conceptual design. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 58 (2) pp. 215-239
“Scenarios have gained acceptance in both research and practice as a way of
grounding software-engineering projects in the users' work. However, the
research on scenario-based design (SBD) includes very few studies of how
scenarios are actually used by practising software engineers in real-world
projects. Such studies are needed to evaluate current SBD approaches and
advance our general understanding of what scenarios contribute to design. This
longitudinal field study analyses the use of scenarios during the conceptual
design of a large information system. The role of the scenarios is compared and
contrasted with that of three other design artefacts: the requirements
specification, the business model, and the user interface prototype. The
distinguishing features of the scenarios were that they were task based and
descriptive. By being task based the scenarios strung individual events and
activities together in purposeful sequences and, thereby, provided an
intermediate level of description that was both an instantiation of overall
work objectives and a fairly persistent context for the gradual elaboration of
subtasks. By being descriptive the scenarios preserved a real-world feel of the
contents, flow, and dynamics of the users' work. The scenarios made the users'
work recognizable to the software engineers as a complex but organized human
activity. This way the scenarios attained a unifying role as mediator among
both the design artefacts and the software engineers, whilst they were not used
for communication with users. The scenarios were, however, discontinued before
the completion of the conceptual design because their creation and management
was dependent on a few software engineers who were also the driving forces of
several other project activities. Finally, the software engineers valued the
concreteness and coherence of the scenarios although that entailed a risk of
missing some effective reconceptions of the users' work.”
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» 2002 «
Hertzum, Morten, Andersen, Hans H. K., Andersen, Verner and Hansen, Camilla B. (2002): Trust in information sources: seeking information from people, documents, and virtual agents. In Interacting with Computers, 14 (5) pp. 575-599
“The notion of trust has been virtually absent from most work on how people assess and choose their information sources. Based on two empirical cases this study shows that software engineers and users of e-commerce websites devote a lot of attention to considerations about the trustworthiness of their sources, which include people, documents, and virtual agents. In the project-based software engineering environment trust tends to be a collaborative issue and the studied software engineers normally know their sources first-hand or have them recommended by colleagues. Outside this network people are cautious and alert to even feeble cues about source trustworthiness. For example, users of e-commerce websites -- generally perceived as single-user environments -- react rather strongly to the visual appearance of virtual agents, though this is clearly a surface attribute. Across the two cases people need access to their sources in ways that enable them to assess source trustworthiness, access alone is not enough.”
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Hertzum, Morten (2002): Organisational implementation: a complex but under-recognised aspect of information-system design. In: Proceedings of the Second Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction October 19-23, 2002, Aarhus, Denmark. pp. 201-204. Available online
“The development of information technology (IT) is often seen as consisting of analysis, design, technical implementation, and testing. While this may involve user input at several stages -- to support the software engineers in devising and revising the system -- this view on systems development marginalises organisational implementation. Organisational implementation comprises the activities that prepare organisations and users for a new system as well as the activities that prepare the system for the transition period during which it enters into operation and takes over from previous systems and artefacts. This study analyses three organisational-implementation activities undertaken during the complete redesign of a large information system: the information plan, the data conversion, and the release strategy. It is found that these activities must be carefully aligned with the technical implementation of the system and that they involve the development of additional system facilities. In sum, this study provides evidence of the complexity and importance of organisational implementation and, thereby, argues that it must be recognised as a first-rate constituent of the design process.”
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» 2001 «
Hertzum, Morten and Jacobsen, Niels Ebbe (2001): The Evaluator Effect: A Chilling Fact About Usability Evaluation Methods. In International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 13 (4) pp. 421-443
“Computer professionals have a need for robust, easy-to-use usability
evaluation methods (UEMs) to help them systematically improve the usability of
computer artifacts. However, cognitive walkthrough (CW), heuristic evaluation
(HE), and thinking- aloud study (TA)-3 of the most widely used UEMs-suffer from
a substantial evaluator effect in that multiple evaluators evaluating the same
interface with the same UEM detect markedly different sets of problems. A
review of 11 studies of these 3 UEMs reveals that the evaluator effect exists
for both novice and experienced evaluators, for both cosmetic and severe
problems, for both problem detection and severity assessment, and for
evaluations of both simple and complex systems. The average agreement between
any 2 evaluators who have evaluated the same system using the same UEM ranges”
Copyrights may apply
Hertzum, Morten, Lalmas, M. and Frokjaer, E. (2001): How Are Searching and Reading Intertwined during Retrieval from Hierarchically Structured Documents?. In: Proceedings of IFIP INTERACT01: Human-Computer Interaction 2001, Tokyo, Japan. pp. 537-544.
» 2000 «
Frøkjær, Erik, Hertzum, Morten and Hornbæk, Kasper (2000): Measurfing Usability: Are Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Satisfaction Really Correlated?. In: Turner, Thea, Szwillus, Gerd, Czerwinski, Mary, Peterno, Fabio and Pemberton, Steven (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2000 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 1-6, 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands. pp. 345-352. Available online
“Usability comprises the aspects effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. The correlations between these aspects are not well understood for complex tasks. We present data from an experiment where 87 subjects solved 20 information retrieval tasks concerning programming problems. The correlation between efficiency, as indicated by task completion time, and effectiveness, as indicated by quality of solution, was negligible. Generally, the correlations among the usability aspects depend in a complex way on the application domain, the user's experience, and the use context. Going through three years of CHI Proceedings, we find that 11 out of 19 experimental studies involving complex tasks account for only one or two aspects of usability. When these studies make claims concerning overall usability, they rely on risky assumptions about correlations between usability aspects. Unless domain specific studies suggest otherwise, effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction should be considered independent aspect of usability and all be included in usability testing.”
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» 1999 «
Hertzum, Morten (1999): Six roles of documents in professionals' work. In: Bødker, Susanne, Kyng, Morten and Schmidt, Kjeld (eds.) ECSCW 99 - Proceedings of the Sixth European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 12-16 September, 1999, Copenhagen, Denmark. p. 41.
Hertzum, Morten (1999): User Testing in Industry: A Case Study of Laboratory, Workshop, and Field Tests. In: Kobsa, Alfred and Stephanidis, Constantine (eds.) Proceedings of the 5th ERCIM Workshop on User Interfaces for All November 28 - December 1, 1999, Dagstuhl, Germany. p. 14. Available online
“Applied user testing involves more usability evaluation methods than laboratory tests and is critically dependent upon a number of issues seldom treated in the literature. The development of the system described in this longitudinal, diary-based study evolved around five user tests: a laboratory test, a workshop test, and three field tests. The user tests had a substantial impact on the focus of the entire development effort in that 25% of the primary developer's time was spent solving problems encountered during the tests. The laboratory test made use of set tasks and was biased toward how tasks were performed with the system, at the expense of what tasks could be performed. The workshop test was more informal and apparently led the users to adopt a more exploratory attitude. Careful arousal and management of the users' commitment to participate actively proved essential to effective user testing, especially during the field tests.”
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Hertzum, Morten and Jacobsen, Niels Ebbe (1999): The Evaluator Effect during First-Time Use of the Cognitive Walkthrough Technique. In: Bullinger, Hans-Jörg (ed.) HCI International 1999 - Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction August 22-26, 1999, Munich, Germany. pp. 1063-1067.
» 1996 «
Hertzum, Morten and Frøkjær, Erik (1996): Browsing and Querying in Online Documentation: A Study of User Interfaces and the Interaction Process. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 3 (2) pp. 136-161
“A user interface study concerning the usage effectiveness of selected retrieval modes was conducted using an experimental text retrieval system, TeSS, giving access to online documentation of certain programming tools. Four modes of TeSS were compared: (1) browsing, (2) conventional boolean retrieval, (3) boolean retrieval based on Venn diagrams, and (4) these three combined. Further, the modes of TeSS were compared to the use of printed manuals. The subjects observed were 87 computing new to them. In the experiment the use of printed manuals is faster and provides answers of higher quality than any of the electronic modes. Therefore, claims about the effectiveness of computer-based text retrieval have to by vary in situations where printed manuals are manageable to the user. Among the modes of TeSS, browsing is the fastest and the one causing the fewest operational errors. On the same two variables, time and operational errors, the Venn diagram mode performs better than conventional boolean retrieval. The combined mode scores worst on the objective performance measures; nonetheless nearly all subject prefer this mode. Concerning the interaction process, the subjects tend to manage the complexities of the information retrieval tasks by issuing series of simple commands and exploiting the interactive capabilities of TeSS. To characterize the dynamics of the interaction process two concepts are introduced; threads and sequences of tactics. Threads in a query sequence describes the continuity during retrieval. Sequences of tactics concern the combined mode and describe how different retrieval modes succeed each other as the retrieval process evolves.”
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Mar 22nd, 2010
Changes to this page (author)
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