Quality and Usability

Joy of Use in Practice

This page describes the results of joint student projects of the Quality & Usability Lab and the Chair of Human Machine Systems (Prof. Dr.-Ing. M. Rötting, Mag. rer. nat. S. Trösterer).

The Joy-of-Use-Button can be downloaded below on this site. Motivation Joy of Use can be characterized as the positive feeling a user has when using technical or interactive systems (s.a. extended version). Different aspects of design as well as of usability research are covered by this catchphrase. With increasing economic relevance Joy of Use becomes more and more a focus of scientific research. Student Group 1: Project Description & Outcome The goal was to investigate the concept of "Joy of Use" and existing measurement methods. For this purpose, the project members collected over 150 individual Joy of Use experiences in personal diaries. From those experiences, ten factors that typically cause Joy of Use could be extracted. Moreover, the individual experiences were used to define nine prototypical situations in which Joy of Use occurs.

During the literature research, three methods that seemed promising to measure Joy of Use were identified (s.a. extended version):

These methods were compared to the collected data, but all methods showed several shortcomings; therefore a new idea to measure Joy of Use was presented: a "Joy-of-Use-Button". Student Group 2: Project Description & Outcome Building on the recommendation of the previous project, the main objective was to create a Joy-of-Use-Button (s.a. extended version) as a system-tray-program running in Windows XP that would allow the computer user to manually record moments of Joy of Use when using the computer. Besides offering the choice between simple and extended evaluation, the program should also capture and save a screenshot along with the evaluation data.

The group chose a smilies scale for simple evaluation, compiled ten categories for extended evaluation and designed a graphical user interface. Driven by the desired functionality of the program, C# was selected as the most suitable programming language. Next the software architecture was designed and the program Joy-of-Use-Button was implemented and its functionality checked. Joy-of-Use-Button Downloads To use the Joy-of-Use-Button for collecting your "Joy of Use" experiences, please download the file Installer.zip and execute the included file JoyOfUse Installer.msi. For further explanations see the file Manual.pdf.Joy-of-Use-Button Installer for Windows XP:
Installer.zip (ZIP, 1,0 MB)

Joy-of-Use-Button User‘s Manual:
Manual.pdf (PDF, 119,8 KB)

Joy-of-Use-Button Source Code:
SourceCode.zip (ZIP, 750,0 KB) Copyright, License & Disclaimer © 2009 Deutsche Telekom Laboratories & Technical University Berlin

Joy-of-Use-Button is free open source software.

You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

For more details see:
www.opensource.org/docs/osd
www.gnu.org/licenses How to Quote For quotations, please use this reference:R. Schleicher, S. Trösterer, J. Rhede, C. Avsar, T. Bedenk, C. Bose, A. Ehrich, R. Havemann, A. Jeremias, R. Lippoldt, A. Meyer. (2009). Joy of Use in Practice. [Online]. Technical University Berlin, Department of Software Engineering and Theoretical Computer Science, Quality and Usability Lab. Available at: <http://www.tu-berlin.de/?id=53724> [Accessed: date]. Contact We would be glad about your feedback concerning this program.

To support our future research, you can also send us your collected Joy-of-Use-Button data sets (CSV files) for anonymous analysis. Thank you very much.

E-mail:


Project Details

Time Frame:
Student Group 1: 04/2008 - 07/2008
Student Group 2: 02/2009 - 07/2009
Student Group 3: 02/2010 - 07/2010T-labs

Team Members: Dr. R. Schleicher

Students:
Student Group 1: J. Reissland, K. Boehme, F. Dittrich, M. Dotzauer, E. Kitay, C. Kurz, A. Longère, P. Martin, M. Morvillier, I. Ramirez, C. Scheid, J. Steffenhagen

Student Group 2: J. Rhede, C. Avsar, T. Bedenk, C. Bose, A. Ehrich, R. Havemann, A. Jeremias, R. Lippoldt, A. Meyer

Partners: Technical University Berlin, Chair of Human Machine Systems, Prof. Dr.-Ing. M. Rötting, Mag. rer. nat. S. Trösterer