Choice of usability evaluation methods

HEURISTIC EVALUATION

This is a method which should be applied to all kinds of projects as it provides a list of principles that the design should satisfy. This list will be very beneficial to us. The only problem is that the reviewers need a previous training to apply this method. So we have to spend some time to learn how to apply this method. Nevertheless we think that the benefit it brings, will be worth the time spent.

Moreover to be more objective, we decided to have a partner group for this method. Since that group is also gonna apply this method, we are planing to evaluate their product and they are going to evaluate ours. This will result with a much much better contribution..

COGNITIVE WALKTHROUGH

We believe this method would be very useful for our project. We used something very similar in the first evaluation of our prototype (we went through scenarios and our prototype with our users so that they could identify any usability issues) so we already have the set of tasks ready. We can apply this method to develop empathy with our users and see what kind of problem they could encounter when using our second and improved prototype of the system.

QUESTIONNAIRE (post test)

We decided to use questionnaires, since it's not time consuming at all and it can give very important feedback from the users. Especially if the participants are not very talkative or have difficulties expressing themselves (because of cultural reasons, personality, etc.) will be forced to evaluate the product or even write their thoughts about the design

THINK ALOUD PROTOCOL

We have decided that we will use this technique for the evaluation of our second prototype because it gave us very good results and feedback when we used it in the first evaluation. Knowing what the users think or where they get stuck using the prototype lets us know what needs to be changed and improved.

All Others

We decided to apply only these 4 techniques mainly we think that these will be the most efficient ones. We only have 15 hours per person to apply these techniques and dealing with users takes a lot of time for us. So we think these will be appropriate for gathering as much feedback as possible from the users.