Thoughts on Usability Testing

“The usability of products has traditionally been tested in controlled laboratory settings. This approach emphasizes how usable a product is. It has been most commonly used to evaluate desktop applications, such as websites, word processors, and search tools. Doing usability testing in a laboratory, or a temporarily assigned controlled environment, enables evaluators to control what users do and to control environmental and social influences that might impact users’ performance. The goal is to test whether the product being developed is usable by the intended user population to achieve the tasks for which it was designed” (Rogers, Sharp, & Preece, 2012).

Thoughts 

As my team and I conducted our initial usability test for accessing the audit worksheet for the BS in Information Technology on Middle Georgia State University’s website, we discovered that our users had a difficult time finding it in a timely manner. This led to the users becoming frustrated with the website and as their frustrations grew, they began to take them out on the computer. Through our evaluations of this initial test, we were able to develop a prototype that would allow the users to access the worksheet in a more timely manner with ease. A second usability test was administered to test this prototype. This test saw much better results with the users noting how much easier it was to find the worksheet. 

Reflections

Usability testing is crucial to ensuring that users will be able to use applications for their intended task with ease. The end user experience ultimately relies on usability testing, evaluations, and prototyping. Without these elements of interaction design, a product may be developed and never used by users because while the product provides a solution to a problem, it is not user-friendly.

References

Rogers, Y., Sharp, H., & Preece, J. (2012). Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Evaluation Thoughts

“Evaluation is integral to the design process. Evaluators collect information about users’ or potential users’ experiences when interacting with a prototype, a computer system, a component of a computer system, an application, or a design artifact such as a screen sketch. They do this to improve its design. Evaluation focuses on both the usability of the system…and on the users’ experience when interacting with the system” (Rogers, Sharp, & Preece, 2012). Reflections Interaction design as a whole is truly focused on the end user experience. Every aspect comes back around to whether or not the user can utilize the product effectively and with ease. Evaluation expounds upon product usability observation and helps engineers and designers determine what aspects of the product needs improvement and what they got right with the initial design. Thoughts As we have been working on developing our new health information system evaluation has been key in helping decide which applications ...
Read more

Interaction Types

Interaction types are the ways a person interacts with a product (Rogers, Sharp, & Preece, 2012, p. 46). There are four different types of interactions: instructing, conversing, manipulating, and exploring. Instructing is how users carry out tasks in a system by giving it commands to follow (Rogers, Sharp, & Preece, 2012, p. 47). Reflections I use instructing interactions almost constantly. As an IT analyst for a pharmacy it is my job to maintain pharmacy specific software and data. Right now, I am working on data collection, transferring it from our current health information system to excel spreadsheets to be uploaded into our new information system. As I use Microsoft Excel I often add rules to highlight certain cells only if I have edited the data in them so other users can see what needs to be updated. Adding such a rule is instructing the program to perform a task based on conditions. Utilizing this allows me to highlight data without having to do it manually. Thoug...
Read more