Tutorial 13

Practical Usability Evaluation

Gary Perlman, Ohio State University

Sunday, May 7

Objective

This tutorial will introduce cost effective methods of evaluating interactive systems, particularly early in the development process, when redesign is least expensive, and provide participants with enough experience to be able to apply the methods on their own.

Content

The tutorial focuses on four methods for evaluating systems. (1) Inspection Methods (such as heuristic evaluation and evaluation checklists) help developers and evaluators focus attention on potential problem areas. (2) Observational Skills and Video help find major usability problems early in system development (e.g., using prototypes). (3) Program Instrumentation records the frequencies and times of actions users take in systems, information useful for isolating high and low usage and effort. (4) Questionnaires gather structured feedback on system usability and enable users to help evaluators generate solutions. These methods can be used by a broad base of evaluators, minimizing skill and equipment requirements. Participants will gain hands-on experience gathering and interpreting each kind of evaluation information.

Audience

This introductory-level tutorial is for software engineers and human factors specialists interested in practical methods for evaluating usability in interactive systems. Managers interested in increasing their knowledge of usability testing in their operations will also benefit.

Presentation

Lecture, video, exercises

Instructor

Gary Perlman has held teaching and/or research positions at the University of California in San Diego, AT&T; Bell Laboratories, the Wang Institute, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and Ohio State University. He is well known as the author of statistical and hypertext software used extensively for user interface evaluation. He is the creator of the HCI Bibliography project, the largest free-access bibliography on HCI. Professor Perlman has served on the ACM/SIGCHI curriculum development group and from 1991 to 1994 was the ACM/SIGCHI education chair.

Keith Instone / instone@acm.org / 95-01-05