Название: Quality Engineering: Quality of Communication Technology Systems
Автор: Sebastian Moller
Издательство: Springer
Год: 2023
Страниц: 202
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.2 MB

The notion of quality and usability has gained a prominent importance in information and communication technology as well as in computer science. In all phases of planning, design, implementation, and optimization of technical systems and services, quality aspects must be taken into account so that their users can experience optimal quality and usability.

In this book, the quality and usability of communication technology systems will be fundamentally addressed. Therefore, the necessary terms are first introduced, and the fundamentals of psychophysics (i.e., the relationship between physical quantities and human perceptions) and psychometrics (i.e., the measurement of perceptual quantities) are established. Based on this, the cycle of human-oriented system development, known as usability engineering, is presented. The measurement and prediction of quality and usability are then illustrated with the help of practical examples of communication engineering systems. In particular, systems for information transmission (telephony, Internet-based voice, and video transmission), speech dialog systems, and multimodal dialog systems are discussed. Finally, models for estimating quality and usability in the development phase of such systems are presented. Thus, the topic of quality engineering, i.e., system development that consistently aims at optimal quality, comes full circle.

Parallel to the terms Quality of Experience and Usability – and sometimes erroneously synonymous with them – the term User Experience (UX) is also often used nowadays. This has its origins in the field of human-computer interaction and goes beyond classic usability inasmuch as it also covers non-functional, so-called hedonic aspects of the user experience, in addition to functional aspects. The ISO standard highlights four important characteristics of user experience: (1) UX is dynamic, that is, changeable over time; (2) UX is contextual, that is, the experience depends on the situation, making it unique and not exactly repeatable; (3) UX is subjective and individual; and (4) UX generally has a positive connotation, focusing on pleasantness and pleasure rather than annoyance and frustration.

After the introduction to the basics of psychophysical measurements and usability engineering, concrete procedures for determining the quality of information and communication technology systems will now be discussed. The focus of this chapter is on systems that work with auditorily perceivable signals. In particular, the modality “spoken language” is of special importance, since it is the most frequently used modality for interpersonal communication; this makes it especially interesting for human-machine interaction. We are particularly interested in the influence of the transmission channel used to transmit speech (or other auditory signals, e.g., music, sounds), and less in human speech production. The evaluation procedures considered here can be applied in a similar form to other problems, such as the evaluation of the quality of music coding procedures. We first consider the telephone channel here, since the telephone is the most frequently used communications technology system for voice transmission. However, the term “telephone channel” is to be seen in a general sense here; in addition to the wired or mobile telephone network, it also includes, for example, voice transmission in packet-switched networks such as the Internet (Voice over IP).

The book is primarily aimed at readers with a technical background, for example in Computer Science, information technology, or electrical engineering. In addition, however, readers from linguistics and communication sciences, acoustics, sociology, human factors, and other fields of knowledge are equally addressed. It does not presuppose any special previous knowledge.