Today’s lecture was the second part to last weeks lecture on usability.
Most of the lecture went over and re-enforced what we had been taught last week but there were a few new key points.
We got shown a usability triangle with the sides labelled with three main areas a designer would need to consider for usability, effectiveness, satisfaction and efficiency. The system needs to be effective, needs to be able to satisfy the users requirements and be as efficient as possible.
Another diagram we looked at was one by Nielsen regarding system acceptability, which relates well to usability (1). As an overview, it says that the product must be socially acceptable and be practical. Making it socially acceptable shouldn’t be too difficult if you put a reasonable amount of thought into what the consumer wants but practicality is more complex and comes with more things you need to think about. I won’t go over each point since it’s quite simple to understand just by looking at the diagram but its important to notice that utility as usability are key factors of practical acceptability.
Both diagrams are really useful and can be used to evaluate products that already exist or you own ideas for a product. I couldn’t really say which one is best because they are both so important and deal with different issues, the triangle for usability and the other diagram for system acceptability. To get the best result you would have to use them both together. They are definitely the best diagrams I have come across while doing usability,
Finally we went on to experience levels. Everyone has a different experience level for different systems or, for example, computing as a whole where they can apply the knowledge gained from using other systems into new systems. The three experience levels we looked at were novice, intermittent and expert. Each user has different needs for the system. The novice is going to need some help with the system, they need to be able to clearly see what the need to do, receive clear feedback to what’s happening and receive lucid error messages when required. The intermittent user needs it to be clear and simple but would not appreciate it if help he or she does not need would slow them down. The expert user would like the system to be as simple and efficient as possible so they can complete their task as efficiently as possible. They would also want more powerful controls and maybe shortcuts such as keyboard shortcuts.
Overall this lecture has been really informative. The diagrams and experienced levels really add more depth to the subject of usability. I await the final usability lecture next week!
At home I had a look over a Wikipedia article on usability to get some additional insight into the subject (2).
The tutorial this week was basically the same thing as last week worded a bit differently. It seems like we’ve done usability to death now, especially in the tutorials.
For the first part we had to think of a task the user would want to perform on the Glamorgan website. I choose finding information about the computer forensics course. We then had to find ways the user might fail in this task. The Glamorgan website is well designed so the only nit pick, for example the search results were too long. We then got a partner to do the same thing but like I said, it was difficult to find much wrong with it, it would have been much better if we performed it on a website that wasn’t professionally designed, that way we would have got some decent results.
The results depended upon who you were paired with though. I personally found the site fine and so did my partner but if you get partnered up with a goth for example they might think the site is too white and could do with some more black (it could happen!) unbalancing the results unless you balance it out by asking more people.
Overall I completed the task in about 20 minutes and didn’t really learn anything that I didn’t learn in the two previous tutorials.
- System acceptability diagram
http://www.euser-eu.org/Document.asp?MenuID=168
- Usability article
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