Fridays lecture was the last of the three usability lectures. We started with a brief recap examining the usability of Daniel’s shoe and why we bought it. The usability of his sock wasn’t up to much though since it had a hole in it!
After that we went onto this weeks main topic, evaluation. Evaluation is concerned with gathering information about the usability a design for a particular product by a specified group of users. This could involve getting the users to measure the usability of the product while using it a relative activity or specific environment.
Evaluation is carried out by companies for a number of reasons. Evaluation helps the company understand the real world by talking directly to the consumers finding out exactly what they want and how they are going to use the product. It is very easy to bypass the negative aspects of a design when you yourself have created it. Evaluation also gives companies the opportunity to compare designs so find out the positive and negatives of each product, find the ideal solution and compare that with their existing product. This way the company could design towards specific targets and standards, for example safety or accessibility standards.
An ideal way to evaluate is to different questions during different points of the design process. This is called formative evaluation. Another way you can evaluate is summative evaluation which is the evaluation of a finished system. This might not help the existing products usability but it is useful if a company wants to develop a similar product or upgraded in the future. It can be good for accessing the product so it can be finely tuned.
Qualitative evaluation is basically an evaluation carried out by the company on their own or any other product. Typically this type of evaluation is non numerical and may be subjective. It’s mainly done by direct observation, questionnaires and even interviews. This type of evaluation could be used to give the company detailed statistics.
These usability lectures have been really interesting but I can’t help thinking we’ve done usability to death now so I’m looking forward to moving on to something new next week. I will definitely come back to the notes I’ve made on usability if I ever need to test an application or product I have made.
At home I did a bit of research on the different types of evaluations which you can see in the links below at the bottom of this blog entry.
This week’s tutorial was about linking Flash frames. I’m really pleased we’ve moved back to Flash, much more interesting than usability checklists! It was also our first go at Action Script, something I had been dreading from day one but it actually wasn’t that bad. I was surprised that all you had to do was click the plus sign, click on the relevant item and the code would come up automatically. I know it must get a bit harder than that when you’re doing more advanced things but its good start! I had a few problems at first because I wasn’t selecting the right object to put the Action Script in but as soon as I noticed where I was going wrong it all went swimmingly. All in all a good introduction to Action Script.
- Summative evaluation:
- Qualitative evaluation
- Formative evaluation
No comments:
Post a Comment