Usability Testing and Laboratories - Acceptance Test - Engineering Assignment Help

Assignment Task

Learning Outcomes

Introduction
Expert Reviews and Heuristics
Usability Testing and Laboratories
Survey Instruments
Acceptance Tests
Evaluation During Active Use and Beyond
Controlled Psychologically-Oriented Experiments
Introduction

Designers can become so entranced with their creations that they may fail to evaluate them adequately 

Experienced designers have attained the wisdom and humility to know that extensive testing is a necessity
The determinants of the evaluation plan include: 
Stage of design (early, middle, late) 
Novelty of project (well-defined vs. exploratory) 
Number of expected users 
Costs of product and finances allocated for testing 
Time available 
Introduction (concluded)
Usability evaluators must broaden their methods and be open to non-empirical methods, such as user sketches, consideration of design alternatives,   and ethnographic studies.
The design team needs to be involved with research on the current system design drawbacks
Usability testing has become an established and accepted part of the design process

Expert Reviews and Heuristics
While informal demos to colleagues or customers can provide some useful feedback, more formal expert reviews have proven to be effective
Expert reviews entail one-half day to one week effort, although a lengthy training period may sometimes be required to explain the task domain or operational procedures
There are a variety of expert review methods to chose from: 

Expert Reviews and Heuristics concluded:
Expert reviews can be scheduled at several points in the development process when experts are available and when the design team is ready for  feedback.  
Different experts tend to find different problems in an interface, so 3-5 expert reviewers can be highly productive, as can complementary usability testing.
Usability Testing and Laboratories
The usability lab consists of two areas: 
 The testing room and the observation room.

Step-by-Step Usability Guide from http://usability.gov/

Usability Testing and Laboratories (continued)
This shows a picture of glasses worn for eye-tracking 

Usability Testing and Laboratories (continued)
Eye-tracking software is attached to the airline check-in kiosk

Usability Testing and Laboratories (continued)

Usability Testing and Laboratories (continued)
The emergence of usability testing and laboratories since the early 1980s
Usability testing not only sped up many projects but that it produced dramatic cost savings 
The movement towards usability testing stimulated the construction of usability laboratories
Usability Testing and Laboratories 

Participation should always be voluntary, and informed consent should be obtained 
Professional ethics practice is to ask all subjects to read and sign a statement like this: 
Institutional Review Boards (IRB) often governs human subject test process 
Usability Testing and Laboratories (continued)

Videotaping participants performing tasks is often valuable for later review and for showing designers or managers the problems that users encounter

Usability test reports
Many variant forms of usability testing have been tried:

Survey Instruments

Written user surveys are a familiar, inexpensive and generally acceptable companion for usability tests and expert reviews 
Keys to successful surveys
Users could be asked for their subjective impressions about specific aspects of the interface such as the representation of: task domain objects and actions 

Survey Instruments (continued)

Other goals would be to ascertain: 
User background (age, gender, origins, education, income) 
Job responsibilities (decision-making influence, managerial roles, motivation) 
Reasons for not using an interface (inadequate services, too complex, too slow) 
Familiarity with features (printing, macros, shortcuts, tutorials) 
Acceptance Test

For large implementation projects, the customer or manager usually sets objective and measurable goals for hardware and software performance 
If the completed product fails to meet these acceptance criteria, the system must be reworked until success is demonstrated
Rather than the vague and misleading criterion of "user friendly,"  measurable criteria for the user interface can be established for the following: 

Acceptance Test (concluded)

In a large system, there may be 8 or 10 such tests to carry out on different components of the interface and with different user communities 

Once acceptance testing has been successful, there may be a period of field testing before national or international distribution 
Evaluation During Active Use and Beyond

Successful active use requires constant attention from dedicated managers, user-services personnel, and maintenance staff

Perfection is not attainable, but percentage improvements are possible

Interviews and focus group discussions 

Evaluation During Active Use and Beyond (continued):

Continuous user-performance data logging 
The software architecture should make it easy for system managers to collect data about:
A major benefit is guidance to system maintainers in optimizing performance and reducing costs for all participants 
Online or chat consultants, e-mail, and online suggestion boxes
Many users feel reassured if they know there is a human assistance available 
On some network systems, the consultants can monitor the user's computer and see the same displays that the user sees 

Evaluation During Active Use and Beyond (continued):

Online suggestion box or e-mail trouble reporting 
Electronic mail to the maintainers or designers 
For some users, writing a letter may be seen as requiring too much effort 

Discussion groups, wikis and newsgroups
Permit postings of open messages and questions
Some are independent, e.g. America Online and Yahoo!
Evaluation During Active Use and Beyond (concluded):
Example output of an automated evaluation tool from TechSmith’s Morae 

Controlled Psychologically-oriented Experiments

Scientific and engineering progress is often stimulated by improved techniques for precise measurement 

Rapid progress in the designs of interfaces will be stimulated as researchers and practitioners evolve suitable human-performance measures and techniques 
Controlled Psychologically-oriented Experiments (continued):

The outline of the scientific method as applied to human-computer interaction might comprise these tasks: 
Deal with a practical problem and consider the theoretical framework 
State a lucid and testable hypothesis 
Identify a small number of independent variables that are to be manipulated 
Carefully choose the dependent variables that will be measured

Controlled Psychologically-oriented Experiments (concluded):

Controlled experiments can help fine-tuning the human-computer interface of actively used systems

Performance could be compared with the control group 

Dependent measures could include performance times, user-subjective satisfaction, error rates, and user retention over time
Summarize the important points

Summarize some of the points discussed in class and also provide some real-world applications related to your points.   

Which is the most likely topic for today’s class ? Can you explain why ?

Which is the least likely topic for today’s class ? Can you justify your opinion ? 

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