Seminar 2 - Individual notes

Evaluation

I was intrigued by how many different factors and methods that comes in play when evaluating. Surprised that it’s such a big area in interaction design. I thought on forehand that the most common way of evaluating a product today must be analytics using the data of natural setting involving users because most tech made today is connected and thus can feed user data to the designer. It became clear that’s not the case. I believe that think-a-louds, which is a controlled setting involving users, provides a lot of useful information to a designer. Unfortunately, the results can be somewhat non representative because the part of the brain that’s responsible for decision making is also used for speech, high level of cognitive awareness, meaning that when the most interesting decisions are made the user is most prone to be quiet. 

As seen in the chapter of data gathering usability testing also might provide both quantitative and qualitative data. The first might be given by keystrokes, mouse movement or the time to complete a task. Qualitative might collected semi structured interviews for example. It’s important though that when interpreting and presenting the data one should be aware of that results might be influenced, a test conducted in a lab says little about how users will interact with the design “in the wild”.

When lacking real user’s heuristic evaluation is the way to go. It seems that the set of heuristics is great guidelines to see whether the design is meeting demands of good interaction design. Doing this before releasing might save lots of time. Fitts’ law describes, in a mathematical manner, the time it takes to select objects on a screen and thus need no users at all and can still be motivating major design decisions which I does seem really useful.

Question: What evaluation method would be the best for our design nr.2?