Usability Study

Chuck Elliot

ED TEC 671 - Prof. Brock Allen

December 2, 1997

Example selected

The example selected was the POSIT multimedia example, 3.1.7 Use color to enhance cognitive processing (Allen and Eckols, 1997a).

Research subjects

The subjects were two adult women who are members of The Corner Clubhouse vocational rehabilitation program for persons with psychiatric diagnoses. The subjects are anonymous but I am using their first initials ("T" and "M") to distinguish them and to indicate who said and did what. T has had previous computer experience. M was in her first day of using a computer, and had just completed about 2 hours training with word processing.

Summary of methods

The usability testing session was held on Tuesday, November 25, 1997, at The Corner Clubhouse in North Park. I trained the subjects in the co-discovery method (Fielden, 1997), with each subject communicating with her partner as they interacted with the application. The training used the POSIT multimedia example, 6.2.1 Use shaded maps for geographically distributed data (Allen and Eckols, 1997b), and lasted 10 minutes. The subjects were then on their own for the second session which lasted 11 minutes (after 2 minutes for the application to load). After the second session, I interviewed the subjects about their satisfaction with the experience, using Fielden’s evaluation questions as a guide for my questions. The interview took 5 minutes. Total time was about 30minutes.

I recorded the audio of the entire session. I took notes on their actions and interactions in the second session, and their responses in the interview. [I could not take notes while I was training them in the practice part.]

Second session

T told M to click until the hourglass appeared.

T explained the navigation arrows.

M did not know how to use the mouse. After a short while, T took the mouse, showing M how to use it, saying to hold still and push once.

They said that the animation of the elephant and ball was "so cute."

They said that the flashing text was "very creative."

Both agreed that it was too hard to read red text on the gray background.

M clicked a button but could not get it to work. It was a 3-button mouse.

At the section labeled "Font," T told M that it was like teaching you word processing.

One of them tried to click the flashing underlined text, but couldn’t catch it.

They did not know what "hypertext" meant, even after reading about it.

T liked the part about linking to information about different job titles. She said that it was good that there were Special Ed teachers, and she wanted to see what her Dad makes, referring to the link for Computer Systems Analyst.

They liked the inverse text best of all and said that it shows up well.

Post-session satisfaction interview

Inferences based on observations

Peer teaching about using the hardware and software might be more efficient than designing tutorials on these topics. T taught M about the mouse and navigational arrows in a very short time.

The content about "hyperlink" was not easily understood by the subjects and might require a different approach.

Some areas of the content were relevant to the subjects’ background. "Font" was relevant to their word processing experience. The linked job data base was relevant to T’s father’s job. These were relevancies that the subjects happened to have, not ones that the application asked about.

They liked flashing text which instructional designers and web designers tend to find nauseating, or at best, prefer to be used very sparingly. Maybe they thought it was "very creative" because it is used sparingly in general, and they had not experienced it before.

They said that anyone could figure out the navigation. This would be after they knew about the arrows which T had to explain to M at the beginning.

They said that the feedback was OK, but there really was not any feedback about whether they had made a correct or incorrect response. They may have thought that getting to a desired place was feedback.

Strengths

Strengths were that all of the questions in the post-session interview resulted in positive answers, including that the program was intuitive, usable, well-perceived, simple to navigate, and had appropriate screen design. Additional strengths were the subjects’ positive comments about the design elements of animation, flashing text, and inverse text

Weaknesses

The content on "hypertext" was not easily understood at first, and needs to be presented better.

The red text on gray background was hard to read. I feel that this combination is aesthetically good, but agree that with the text size used, it was hard to read. Larger and/or bolder text would work, from my experience with this combination.

They could not catch the flashing underlined text. They were probably misled to believe that it was linkable because of the underlining.

References

Allen, B. S. & Eckols, S. L. (1997a). 3.1.7 Use color to enhance cognitive processing. In POSIT: Handbook of usability principles. San Diego: San Diego State University Foundation & California State Employment Development Department. Available:

http://clipt.sdsu.edu/posit/ex/0027.html

Allen, B. S. & Eckols, S. L. (1997b). 6.2.1 Use shaded maps for geographically distributed data. In POSIT: Handbook of usability principles. San Diego: San Diego State University Foundation & California State Employment Development Department. Available:

http://clipt.sdsu.edu/posit/ex/0064.html

Fielden, C. J., Jr. (1997). An evaluation of the POSIT database. Presented to the Office of Workforce Policy, California State Employment Development Department. San Diego: San Diego State University High Tech Center for Students with Disabilities.

Available:

http://clipt.sdsu.edu/posit/POSIT_PDF_Files/Evaluation.pdf