The system under study is the Metadata Tagging Tool for the Instructor Portal of UCWISE. The purpose of the Metadata Tagging Tool is to assist the UCWISE professors, instructors, and TAs in tagging their curriculum content with metadata. This tool will thus help facilitate fast and easy categorization, retrieval, reuse, and sharing of information related to the curriculum and study material in the UCWISE instruction system.
The present version of the Metadata Tagging Tool is the second interactive prototype that has been implemented. The prototype has been developed through an iterative user-centered design process. Within the process, usability tests have been conducted on, both, Low-Fi and interactive prototypes. The feedback generated from those tests, as well as an Heuristic Evaluation performed by the UI Design Patterns group, has aided in the refinement and improvement of the interface.
The purpose of this study was to identify further areas of the system that could be simplified or improved upon. Our aim is to make the metadata tagging process easy and less cumbersome so that the users (instructors and TAs of UCWISE) who are hard pressed for time can tag their metadata easily in the least possible time. To achieve this goal, we wanted to ensure a minimal number of steps for the user to perform a task, and make the features of the interface easy to understand and intuitive for the user. Using this study we wanted to uncover any design problems that could be improved further and generate new ideas such that the tool can be made as efficient and user friendly as possible. The UI of our prototype has evolved considerably from the initial design and in this study we wanted to verify whether the changes we made were helpful. We also wanted to see if the changes improved the efficiency of performing a task for the users.