Design and Development of a Usable User Interface for a Search Engine in the Oil and Gas Domain

Currently, in the oil and gas industry, document handling tasks are performed manually. Intellog is developing a search engine for handling the documents to various users in this domain. Due to complexity of the search task and variety of the users, development of a usable user interface for the search engine is challenging. In this project usability engineering methods will be used to develop a user interface, which will be integrated into the intellog's software. Additionally, this project will serve as a case study for evaluation of effectiveness of a tool-set named ActiveStory Enhanced, which was developed in University of Calgary. The ActiveStory Enhanced is a tool-set that supports creation of web-based prototypes and conducting usability testing without having the user on-site. The data about the usability flaws that are discovered by using the toolset,as well as the usability flaws that remain uncovered will be gathered. This data will be analyzed to provide suggestion for enhancement of the tool-set.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Frank Maurer

Student:

Valeh Hosseinzadeh Nasser

Partner:

Intellog Inc.

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Energy

University:

University of Calgary