Transcript Architecture

7/6/2015
1
ANALYSIS OF SOFTWARE
USABILITY EVALUATION METHODS
By Siyao (Amy) Kong
University of Southern California
7/6/2015
Overview
 Introduction
- What is Human Factor?
- What is usability?
 Usability Evaluation Methods
 Pros & Cons
 Possible Improvement
 Contribution to CSCI 577ab
 Conclusion
2
7/6/2015
Introduction
 What is Human Factor?
– A study about interaction between people and system
– A study about designing better user experience
– To design effective user interface
 What is usability?
‒ The ease of use of the system
‒ Influence users’ satisfaction of the system
3
7/6/2015
4
Usability Evaluation Methods
 User-based
‒ Evaluate the quality and quantitative result
‒ Performance, non-verbal behavior, attitude, stress, motivation
 Expert-based
‒ Domain expert’s rating
 Theory-based
‒ learning curve, performance times, and ease of understanding
7/6/2015
Evaluation technique
 Diagnostic
‒ Highlight problem area, recommend redesign
 Summative
‒ Experimental task support, degree of user support
‒ Common in expert-based and user-based approaches
 Certification
‒ Against certain criteria
5
7/6/2015
Evaluation technique
 Expert-based evaluation
‒ by a group of human-computer interaction researchers
 User-based testing
‒ regular PC users as subject
 Theory-based evaluation
‒ based on guidelines and principles
 Cognitive walk-through method
‒ Step through typical user tasks
‒ Compare actions and feedbacks
6
7/6/2015
Pros & Cons
 Expert-based
‒ Thorough than other techniques
‒ Requires experts
 User-based
‒ Only highlight significant problems
‒ Simple to make responsive change
‒ Expensive cost: time, money, user
 Theory-based
‒ Identify recurring and general problems
‒ No need for expert
‒ Miss severe problems
 Cognitive walk-through
‒ Identify goals and assumptions
‒ Fail to identify many problems
7
7/6/2015
8
Possible Improvement
 Introduce expert knowledge into theory, extends
guidelines and problem identification, form more thorough
principles
 Add more quality and quantitative criteria for user-based
evaluation
‒ Interface responsiveness, effective hint, operation success rate
 Add more non-typical tasks to cognitive walk-through
methods
7/6/2015
9
Contribution to CSCI 577ab
 Provide guideline for evaluate the ease of use of the
system
‒ Adopted several methods for project usability evaluation
 Improves the usability of the system
‒ Refined ambiguous interface elements
‒ Display elements according to different scenarios
‒ Redesign layouts to improve understandability
‒ Improve user input efficiency
7/6/2015
Conclusion
 Important factor to influence user experience
 Indispensable factor of a successful software
10
7/6/2015
11
References
 Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability
 Human Factors in Software Engineering
J.D. Gannon, University of Maryland
 Usability Evaluation with the Cognitive Walkthrough
http://www.sigchi.org/chi95/proceedings/tutors/jr_bdy.htm
 Criteria For Evaluating Usability Evaluation Methods
http://www.idemployee.id.tue.nl/m.m.bekker/hartson.pdf
12
7/6/2015
Thank you!