Assignment: Pilot Usability Study
SIMS 213, Spring 2005
Due on Thursday, April 28
Overview and Goal:

Prototype:

Participants:

Task Scenarios:

Measurements and Observations:

Followup Interview:

Procedure:

(Not all of these will apply to every project. For example, in some cases you may want to see if the participants understand the design without a demo. Use your judgement.)

Results:

Formal Experiment Design:

Write-up:

Turn in the writeup on the web, including the following information:

  1. Introduction
    • Introduce the system being evaluated
    • State the purpose and rationale of the study
  2. Method:
    • Participants (who -- demographics -- and how were they selected)
    • Apparatus (describe the equipment you used and where)
    • Tasks (can link to earlier task descriptions if they haven't changed)
      • Describe what you looked for when each task scenario was performed. If you made new scenarios, describe them first, otherwise a link to the earlier descriptions is fine.
    • Procedure
      • Describe what you did and how
    • Screenshots
      • In order to have a record of what the interface looked like when this study was performed, provide screenshots of key views of the interface in action.
  3. Test Measures
    • Describe what you measured and why
  4. Results
    • Results of the tests
  5. Discussion
    • What you learned from the pilot study
      • what you might change in your interface from these results
      • what you might change for the "real" experiment
  6. Formal Experiment Design
    • Describe the information requested in the description of the hypothetical formal experimental design described above (hypotheses, factors (dependent and independent variables), blocking).
  7. Appendices
    • Materials (all things you read --- demo script, instructions -- or handed to the participant -- task instructions).
    • Raw data (e.g., entire merged critical incident logs)

Presentation:

Each group will get 20 minutes to discuss their project. This leaves 5 minutes between groups for setup time. Be sure to make a link to your presentation from your project page, to save on setup time. The talk should cover at least the following: