Collaborative Environments: Accessibility and Usability for Users with Special Needs - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 337

The usefulness factor . The main goal of usefulness is to realize how users accept
an environment, considering that, in some cases, focusing on the usability can be
harmful [ 12 ]. In order to address this problem, we take into consideration the QUIM
usefulness factor as one of the most important factors at the base of our model.
It deals with how to improve the acceptability of the system in terms of quality in
use, i.e., how much the interaction style fits the user's activities and mental model
(e.g., her/his knowledge, skills, profile, activity procedures). The last column of
Table 13.5 shows a set of criteria for this factor.
The communication factor . A lack of the usefulness factor is that it does not
consider specific problems due to the communication process among produsers who
are collaborating using the same system, or the active role that users play in
creating, sharing, and transferring knowledge. These considerations require us to
extend our model, taking the communication factor into account. This factor is a
new factor with respect to the QUIM model, and it is introduced because the
communication is a basic factor in the context of collaborative environments.
This new factor entails heuristics focusing on communication issues in order to
support appropriate verbal, gesture exchange of messages and to enable the efficient
sharing of artifacts, data protection, collaboration, and coordination of the users'
actions. Table 13.7 shows a set of criteria for this factor. These criteria, except the
first, are already used in the context of other factors but have also some relevance in
the communication field. The first criterion, collaborability , is introduced to define
a measure for the evaluation of the collaborative degree of the environment.
Collaborability represents a criterion to assess how a set of group activities can
achieve a team's targeted objectives with respect to individual effort or contribution
of each member team. The metrics at the base of this criterion are addressed to
measure the capability of an interactive system for supporting:

l The feeling of virtual presence
l The creation of a common awareness without fearing that personal ideas will be
diminished
l The possibility of asking questions for clarification or more details or to com-
ment on other contributions
l The possibility of sharing and transferring multimedia objects (keeping a refer-
ence to whoever has posted the material)
l The protection of the data and personal information
l The coordination of user's actions and contributions

Comparing Tables 13.6 and 13.7 , it is easy to identify some overlaps between the
communication and the accessibility factors. These overlaps are justified by the
need to guarantee an accessible content after the collaborative process has been

Table 13.7 Criteria for the communication factor
Communication
Collaborability

Controllability Loading time Navigability Operability

Privacy Resource utilization Safety Time behavior User guidance