ABSTRACT
Online shopping has gained much popularity over the past decade. Indeed, in a post-COVID world, online shopping is the only medium of shopping for many. A great deal of research effort has been devoted to understanding the factors that positively or negatively influence online shopping behavior of consumers. However, most of these influence relationships have been studied individually, and not how such factors interrelate with each other and thus the underlying complex driving and dependence relationships among those factors are unknown. Moreover, these underlying driving and dependence relationships among online shopping behavior factors can be highly dependent on the cultural context of the consumers. In this research we identify the key factors that have been shown to have influence on online shopping behavior from a rigorous review of literature. We then apply an Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) technique to find the underlying complex hierarchical relations of factors related to Australian and Chinese culture. We apply MICMAC analysis to find the driving and dependence power of these factors in context of these two cultures. We finally explain the differences and similarities found for Australian and Chinese culture with reference to Hofstede’s Cross Culture theory. Prominent findings include timeliness of delivery and order accuracy is considered having high dependence and driving power in the Australian context but has low driving and dependence power in Chinese context. Our findings will be beneficial for including better cultural context factors into future online shopping platform design. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Since its first being reported in December 2019, COVID-19 has spread quickly around the world, and becomes a global pandemic. Previous information sources have a number of problems when providing COVID-19 information web services. First, the information from government or traditional media (i.e., TV and newspaper) is not frequently updated. Second, different layers of the government (state and federal government) may provide contradictory information. Also, there are many rumours spread on social media, which makes it difficult for people to know who and what to trust. Finally, the current information about COVID-19 is fragmented. It takes effort for people to aggregate the information they need to see from different places. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in introducing a large number of "emerging apps" to the mobile app market. These apps were developed and deployed quickly to address the urgency of the situation. This gave us an indication that the cycle of having new emerging apps will likely reoccur in every upcoming emergency in the future e.g. for advice and guidance during bush fires, floods, other pandemics, etc. We carried out an in-depth analysis of user reviews and version history release notes for 30 COVID-19 apps that were developed in a great hurry in 2020. We identified many diverse accessibility issues that exist, not just related to conventional challenged end-user accessibility issues, but including the ability to register, access, download, and use from different app stores in different countries and for different end-users. From this large-scale analysis, we developed a new advisory tool for software developers of emerging apps to avoid many of the wide accessibility issues presented in these COVID-19 apps. A user evaluation of our prototype tool with 13 real-world app developers indicates it will assist developers to address many of these issues prior to initial emerging app deployment.
ABSTRACT
To successfully satisfy user needs, software developers need to suitably capture and implement user requirements. A critical and often overlooked characteristic of user requirements are "human aspects", which are personal circumstances affecting the use of software (e.g., age, gender, language, etc.). To better understand how human aspects can impact the use of software, this work presents an empirical study focusing on app reviews of COVID-19 contact tracing apps. We manually analyzed a dataset of 2,611 app reviews sampled from the reviews associated with 57 COVID-19 apps. To analyze the reviews, we performed qualitative and quantitative analyses. The analyses characterize the human aspects contained in the reviews and investigate whether the apps suitably address the human aspects. We identified 716 reviews related to human aspects and grouped these into nine categories. Of these 716 reviews, 8% report bugs, 14% describe future/improvement requests, and 22% detail the user experience. Our analysis of the results reveal that human aspects are important to users and we need better support to account for them as software is developed.
ABSTRACT
Many people around the world are worried about using or even downloading COVID-19 contact tracing mobile apps. The main reported concerns are centered around privacy and ethical issues. At the same time, people are voluntarily using Social Media apps at a significantly higher rate during the pandemic without similar privacy concerns compared with COVID-19 apps. To better understand these seemingly anomalous behaviours, we analysed the privacy policies, terms & conditions and data use agreements of the most commonly used COVID-19, Social Media & Productivity apps. We also developed a tool to extract and analyse nearly 2 million user reviews for these apps. Our results show that Social Media & Productivity apps actually have substantially higher privacy and ethical issues compared with the majority of COVID-19 apps. Surprisingly, lots of people indicated in their user reviews that they feel more secure as their privacy are better handled in COVID-19 apps than in Social Media apps. On the other hand, most of the COVID-19 apps are less accessible and stable compared to most Social Media apps, which negatively impacted their store ratings and led users to uninstall COVID-19 apps more frequently. Our findings suggest that in order to effectively fight this pandemic, health officials and technologists will need to better raise awareness among people about COVID-19 app behaviour and trustworthiness. This will allow people to better understand COVID-19 apps and encourage them to download and use these apps. Moreover, COVID-19 apps need many accessibility enhancements to allow a wider range of users from different societies and cultures to access to these apps.
ABSTRACT
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic highlights the importance of dashboards for providing critical real-time information. In order to enable people to obtain information in time and to understand complex statistical data, many developers have designed and implemented public-oriented COVID-19 "information dashboards" during the pandemic. However, development often takes a long time and developers are not clear about many people's information needs, resulting in gaps between information needs and supplies. According to our empirical study and observations with popular developed COVID-19 dashboards, this seriously impedes information acquirement. Our study compares people's needs on Twitter with existing information suppliers. We determine that despite the COVID-19 information that is currently on existing dashboards, people are also interested in the relationship between COVID-19 and other viruses, the origin of COVID-19, vaccine development, fake new about COVID-19, impact on women, impact on school/university, and impact on business. Most of these have not yet been well addressed. We also summarise the visualization and interaction patterns commonly applied in dashboards, finding key patterns between data and visualization as well as visualization and interaction. Our findings can help developers to better optimize their dashboard to meet people's needs and make improvements to future crisis management dashboard development. IEEE
ABSTRACT
Aim COVID-19 has instigated rapid alterations in surgical care. Performing CRS-HIPEC for peritoneal metastases during such challenging times has required several perioperative changes. We report our early experience of undertaking CRS-HIPEC during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods A retrospective review of all patients undergoing CRS-HIPEC was conducted (1st April/20 – 28th May/20). Data was retrieved from a prospectively maintained peritoneal malignancy database. Results Twelve patients (M:F, 5:7;median, 56yr (26-70yr)) underwent CRS-HIPEC. Five patients had peritoneal metastases of colorectal origin, with a median peritoneal-carcinomatosis-index (PCI) of 12, while four patients had advanced pseudomyxoma peritonei (median, PCI 23). Patients were pre-operatively assessed for SARS-CoV-2. Operating theatres (OT) with laminar-air-flow-systems and high-efficiency-particulate-air-filters were utilized. Essential personnel were permitted through a one-way entry/exit pathway. Double plume extractors were used to remove surgical smoke throughout the operation. HIPEC was conducted using the closed rather than open abdomen technique. Patients were transferred via a modified critical care pathway to HDU. Early results have identified no significant COVID-related complications. Conclusion Initial experience of surgery for peritoneal malignancy in the COVID-19 era is encouraging. We will continue to carefully audit our perioperative outcomes as our experience builds.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted almost every sphere of life. Higher education in Australia was similarly majorly impacted, and due to the sudden necessity of ensuring physical distancing, on campus teaching became impossible. Most of the higher educational institutes in Australia moved to using a distance education mode to continue delivery of teaching with barely a few weeks warning. This article presents experiences moving a data structures and networking course taught to Software Engineering students at an Australian university during COVID-19 pandemic to online delivery. Due to the nature of the course and student cohort, a number of challenges were faced teaching the course in online mode compared to that for which it was designed. We summarize key lessons learned and propose some guidelines for future course design to take advantage of online learning while maintaining learning outcomes. © 2020 IEEE.