Aide's Aide Usability Testing
As suggested by Bailey, 2006 successful usability testing should include measures of three main areas: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. In order to evaluate the Aide's Aide design with all three areas in mind I used task scenarios with the following measures:
1. The time to complete specific task as the measure for efficiency. ``Time to complete'' measure makes most sense in comparison with the same task that was completed without the use of a computer program or with a different program. In my case I wanted to compare time to complete a task sheet by hand with the time to complete it using the prototype (I asked participants to time the process of filling out the form I used for the computer test). I also timed all other tasks for each participant in order to compare their completion times with times it takes a very proficient computer user to complete each task. This measure gives approximation of how fast or slow the participant can identify website's functions in order to complete a task. However, some tasks have portions where participants need to type in information, and these parts of tasks depend on the participants' abilities and computer skills, so not the whole of each task is suitable for benchmark comparison.
2. The number of correctly completed tasks as well as quality of the output of these tasks (where appropriate) as the measure for effectiveness. I asked participants to verbalize their thoughts and actions while completing the tasks. The think-aloud method should provide me with users' immediate reactions on the task at hand and this may be one of the best ways to understand users troubles or successes in completing tasks (Oyugi et al., 2008).
3. The questionnaires, user remarks and video recording of user experiences with the system as the measures for satisfaction.
Since it is impossible to test everything in one session I decided to focus my attention on whether the users understand the structure and functionality of the website. I designed the tasks to form a single usage scenario with gradual progression that takes user through registration, site exploration and then performing a task for each of website's major features.
Full report about usability testing of the Aide's Aide you can find by downloading the file on the right.
| milestone5.pdf | |
| File Size: | 962 kb |
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