Nov. 16, 2018

Faculty, student author paper about disaster management systems

Three Northwest Missouri State University faculty and a student collaborated recently to present a paper that explores design issues of disaster management systems using mobile usability testing.

Dr. Ajay Bandi and Dr. Abdelaziz Fellah, who teach in the School of Computer Science and Information Systems, worked with Harish Bondalapati, a graduate student in Northwest’s applied computer science master’s degree program, and Professor of Geography Dr. Mark Corson to author the paper, “Mobile Usability Testing: Gathering Evidence for Designing User Interfaces for Emergency Disaster Management Systems.” They presented it during the International Society for Computers and their Applications’ (ISCA) 27th International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Engineering, Oct. 8-10 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The authors followed a systematic approach to conducting usability testing on mobile devices and measured performance speed, error rates, learning time and satisfaction. They also provided general guidelines for developing mobile user interfaces and using the appropriate components to overcome the design issues.

“This is a scholarship of integration of two cross-disciplinary areas – computer science and emergency disaster management – and an example of profession-based learning,” Bandi said. “The original scholarly contribution of this research was the development of responsive architecture framework for the emergency disaster management system (EDMS) for both web and mobile platforms. The evidence from the case studies supported establishing the guidelines for designing mobile interfaces for EDMS.”

The University Research Committee funded their research between March 2016 and March 2017.