Methods and Techniques
Usability Evaluation
Cognitive Walkthrough
GOMS
Heuristic Evaluation
User Action Notation
Usability Evaluation
The USINACTS usability evaluation tutorial aims to provide
an up-to-date review of the most common methods and tools available for
usability assessment of systems and services, mainly in the Information
Technology area. It is provided by the USINACTS project as a support information
for all ACTS projects and for all researchers in the area. The tutorial
is very specific about research methodology.
http://atwww.hhi.de/USINACTS/tutorial/
Cognitive Walkthrough
By Darryn Lavery and Gilbert Cockton
Contains:
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A description of Cognitive Walkthrough;
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A self assessed test to allow analysts to assess their understanding of
Cognitive Walkthrough;
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A checklist of Cognitive Walkthrough questions for use in the analysis;
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Problem record sheets to record usability problems during analysis.
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A questionnaire to fill in after the analysis.
Downloads as a PDF file.
http://crete.dcs.gla.ac.uk/publications/reports/1997-20.pdf
GOMS
Goals Operators Methods and Selection Rules (GOMS) models can
be practical if the effort required to produce them is commensurate with
their limited practical accuracy. QGOMS is a direct manipulation
tool for quickly building GOMS models. Models are represented as a graphical
tree, similar to programming structure charts. Advanced features
allow rapid model constuction and analysis.
http://bilbo.isu.edu/qgoms/index.html
Heuristic Evaluation
This presentation of Heuristic Evaluation has been developed for use
on UK EPSRC project no. GR/K82727 ( Extending HCI Design Principles and
Task Analysis for Software and Data Visualisation) by Darryn Lavery, Gilbert
Cockton and Malcolm Atkinson. A structure has been applied to the heuristics
described in (Nielsen, 1994).
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/asp/materials/SVHE_1.0/materials.html
Heuristic evaluation is the most popular of the usability inspection
methods. Heuristic evaluation is done as a systematic inspection of a user
interface design for usability. The goal of heuristic evaluation is to
find the usability problems in the design so that they can be attended
to as part of an iterative design process. Heuristic evaluation involves
having a small setof evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance
with recognized usability principles (the "heuristics").
http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/
Jakob Nielsen's 10 usabilty heuristics annotated with Web-specific
comment, by Keith Instone.
http://webreview.com/pub/97/10/10/usability/sidebar.html
A CHI'95 paper, describing an extension and validation of Nielsen's
heuristic evaluation approach, to include "humanistic" aspects of systems.
Three additional heuristics addressed quality of work product, quality
of work life, and respect for users' skills. In a participatory heuristic
evaluation of an intelligent tutoring system, the three new heuristics
performed comparably to earlier sets of heuristics.
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi95/Electronic/documnts/intpost/mm2bdy.htm
User Action Notation