Developing Usable Experiences

ExpoSItion and Usability testing

March 16th, 2008 9:28 pm —  133 views

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Both yesterday and today had me heading to campus to work on various projects. Yesterday I met with the BGE1 to put together a tri-fold display highlighting the project we worked on last semester. The project went very well, our client was pleased, and our professor gave us kudos (and an A). Each year there is an exposition where any student or group of students can put together a display to showcase their effort. While I’ve never been to one of these before, I understand that businesses come to check things out, sort of scouting. Though I’m not looking for a new job, I’m curious to see how this whole thing works. Plus, it’s great working with the BGE again.

Today we conducted the third of our usability tests. These carefully2 arranged usability tests are very interesting and provide concrete information about the system we’re evaluating and how user friendly it really is. We’re evaluating a web-based application that students at the university use to enroll for classes. We’ve created 5 tasks that we ask a person to perform. I use my laptop with a camera, microphone, and software that captures (as a movie) everything the person is doing in the interface. We then ask them to complete the tasks while speaking out loud what they are doing and thinking. This is pretty standard usability testing done on a shoe-string budget.

It’s interesting to see the types of challenges they run into, the loops they get caught in, and their reaction to the system. Patterns are definitely emerging that reveal where attention is needed. The focus of this project has been to evaluate and identify aspects of the web application that cause confusion, are difficult to understand, are inconsistent, or counter intuitive. Each milestone has come at it from a different angle and between them, we’re identifying some important interface and design issues.

I also met with another group today to work on a project having to do with blogging, the blogosphere, and related aspects of behavioral psychology. We are focusing our effort and research on matters concerning motivation and social interaction as they relate to blogging. We have identified a number of research articles from journals of psychology, journals on computer-mediated communication, and other recent academic research. This is a very interesting project.

Why people blog, what motivates a person to continue or stop blogging, and how blogging impact their social lives, both online and off-line, are questions whose answers may lie in the realm of behavioral psychology. Like I’ve alluded to before, blogging, reading blogs, and commenting on blogs is something that a person has to do of their own free will. Seems simple enough, but how much of it can be meaningfully articulated?

So I have to admit, I’m kind of burned out on school work for tonight. A hot bath and a good book sounds marvelous. The idea of going to bed before 10 PM seems even more so. The next few weeks are going to be full of hard work and late nights wrapping up projects for the semester. The semester is almost over and summer, golf season, concerts, camping trips, and rock hunting await. Life goes by so fast.

Image: I took this yesterday when I was working with the BGE cutting and pasting pictures and thumbnails on our exposition board. The expoSItion is tomorrow during lunch. Should be an interesting experience.

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  1. Best Group Ever [↩]
  2. Mostly carefully. We learn things to do and not do with each test we conduct. [↩]

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