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The purpose of this study is to develop predictive models for grip strength, dexterity and manipulability, for four minority populations using anthropometry. A total of sixty subjects representing Hispanics, African Americans, Asian Indians and Vietnamese participated in this study. Subjects performed the three tasks for the following five hand conditions: bare hand, cotton gloves, Kevlar gloves, leather gloves and vinyl gloves. Grip strength was measured using a standard Jamar hand dynamometer. A pegboard task was used to measure the dexterity of the subjects. Manipulability was measured using knot-tying task. Models were developed with linear modeling techniques. Hand breadth was found to be the most contributing factor for all the three tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a summary of usability work done at the Usability Laboratory at University of Nebraska in the last few years. The main objective of the first study was to compare the efficiency and effectiveness between user testing and heuristic analysis in evaluating four different commercial websites. The results showed that both user testing and heuristic analysis addressed very different usability problems and both methods are equally efficient and effective. In the second study. the primary purpose was to compare the performance between remote usability testing and traditional usability testing. The results indicate that remote usability testing is no different from traditional usability testing. The third study attempted to look at cultural differences in web usability. The results indicated that cultural dimensions have significant effects on user's web preferences. The primary objective of final study was to determine if user's surfing behavior could be predicted through their cognitive style. Results show that cognitive span scores are not strong enough to form association rule with individual difference clusters of web surfing behavior. The results are discussed with respect to all perspectives of Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]