Assignments 3, 4, 5: Usability Evaluations


Assignments


This set of assignments consists of usability evaluations for the product or system you’re working on in your team project. You need to select two out of the three alternatives below.
Depending on the project topic, some of the evaluation methods may not be practical for your team. If you have problems identifying two suitable assignments, talk to me during the lab.
The assignment is to be performed by your project team, and I usually grade it as a team effort.

Goals and Objectives


  • The goal of this set of assignment is to allow students to get practical experience using different usability evaluation methods and tools.

Description


There is a generic description of Usability Evaluation assignments that identifies common aspects across all three variations.

A3: Usability Evaluation with Morae

For this assignment, you are expected to use the Morae usability evaluation toolset or something similar (Camtasia is an alternative for the Mac platform).

A4: Usability Evaluation with Eye Tracking


For this assignment, you are expected to use eye tracking devices or other psychophysical methods (brain waves, galvanic skin response, fMRI). We have a set of SMI Eye Tracking Glasses and several brain-computer interface devices, but no access to others. If you do, let me know and we can discuss their suitability.

A5: Usability Evaluation with Outside Experts


At least two of the evaluation methods you use must include experiments with participants from outside this class. Typically these are direct observation experiment where participants work through a given task, and your team observes them as they do this. For one assignment, you are expected to use the Morae usability evaluation toolset or something similar (Camtasia is an alternative for the Mac platform) and the SMI Eye Tracking Glasses for another one. The third one should include an external expert; it can be a heuristic evaluation (similar to A1), or it can be another iteration of one of the previous two with the additional involvement of the outside expert. Ideally, the outside expert should have expertise both in the domain of the project and with usability evaluations; however, one of the two is sufficient.
If there are strong reasons why this isn’t possible, you can talk to me about alternatives, such as the classes mentioned above.