Individual notes, Seminar 2 - Niklas Lindqvist

Chapter 13 – Introducing Evaluation

This chapter presents an introduction on how to evaluate a design. It focuses on both the usability of the design and the user’s experience/satisfaction.

The problem with a design often occur when the producers find the product useful but don’t understand that other users don’t understand how to use it. This I find true in numerous of cases, for example webpages where it’s almost impossible to find what you are looking for. Evaluation of a product enables them to check that their design fit others as well, and should probably be used more often.

There are 3 main types of evaluation:

• Controlled settings involving users (labs, everything is measured)
• Natural setting involving users (field work)
• Any setting not involving users (models and analytics)

Doing a combination of the evaluations is something I would like to aim for in our project following something similarly to:

Chapter 14 - Evaluation studies: From controlled to natural settings

Chapter 14 describes how to evaluate in different types of environments. For example controlled lbs and natural settings. Usability testing is the focus of the chapter.

An interesting concept is the in the wild studies where the researchers are far away and monitor the user with different methods let the users act more “natural”. This is a study that probably have become much easier to implement with new technology and might be improved even further in the future.

Chapter 15 - Evaluation: Inspections, Analytics, and Models

Inspection evaluation methods are in focus of this chapter but I find the Predictive model to be the most interesting. In Fitts' Law where predicting the time it takes to complete a small task with a pointing device such as the mouse on a computer can be used to estimate the total time of a complex task in the same program. This could be develop further using time it takes to press certain keys on a keyboard or other bottoms on a special dashboard when the final design in to expensive to produce iterate to its final stat.

Question for seminar:

What sort of evaluation will be able for us to do on our design?