IS214. Needs and Usability Assessment

School of Information Management & Systems, University of California Berkeley

Updated 1/21/03


Prof. NANCY VAN HOUSE
vanhouse@sims.berkeley.edu

TuTh 12:30-2:00 PM

202 South Hall
Office Hrs: TBA

ASSIGNMENTS

PROJECTS

HOME

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CLASS TOPICS

Requirements: Collecting Data from and About Users
Week 2 Ethnographic Methods
Week 3 User and Task Analysis
Week 4 Measurement and Evaluation
Week 4b Interviews and Focus Groups (I)
Week 5a
Interviews and Focus Groups (II)
Week 5b
Qualitative Data Analysis and Presentations
Week 6 Surveys
Week 7a Quantitative Data Analysis and Presentation

Prototype Evaluation
Week 8 Design Guidelines, Heuristics, and Inspection Methods Week 9 Usability Testing

Spring Break

Week 10a Writing Usability Reports
Week 10b NO CLASS

Post-release Evaluation
Week 11 Monitoring, User Satisfaction Surveys, User Feedback
Week 12 Universal Usability
Week 13a Ethics
Week 13b Credibility, Offshore Usability
Week 14 Project Presentations

 

 

WEB RESOURCES

The following are resources for Web Survey Tools:

Tips:
http://www.inquisite.com/
http://www.aviva-pages.com/survey/

The following are resources for Web Accessibility:

Tips:
http://www.usability.gov/guidelines/accessibility.html#one
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/facsocsi/acess/tips.htm
Color Pallet:
http://www.iboost.com/build/reference/1045.htm
Testing:
http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp
Guidelines
http://www.w3.org/WAI
http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=Content&ID=12

 

The following site is a good resource on Statistical Tools:

http://stat-www.berkeley.edu/~stark/SticiGui/index.htm

The following sites offer examples of Survey Question Design:

UnabilityNet'sMethods Table -- A good matrix of methods classified by stage in project. Not exhaustive, but useful.

Questionnaires in Usability Engineering -- A reasonably good site, however, the link they provide to their own web usability survey is currently broken.

UsabilityFirst.com -- This website provides information and resources for key issues related to usability in website and software design. UsabilityFirst.com believes that helping people do their work in an effective and enjoyable way should be the top priority in design because if a product is not usable, people will not use it.

Usability Professionals' Association -- A forum to promote usability concepts and techniques worldwide.

Usable Web -- A comprehensive guide to resources about Web usability.

Usability Testing and Research by Carol Barnum -- Links to web resources on usability tied to Barnum's book on usability.

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox -- One-stop shopping for Nielsen's view of the (web) world.

AskTog.com -- Bruce Tognazzini�s columns on design.

Usability SIG (Society for Technical Communication) -- Lots of useful references.

The HCI Bibliograhy -- The most comprehensive source on human-computer interaction.

Bobby -- A web site from the Center for Applied Special Technology that will analyze any web page for conformity with the W3C web content accessibility guidelines. Try it out!

Usability.gov -- National Cancer Institute resource for designing usable web sites and user interfaces.

 

BOOKS

A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, by Joseph S. Dumas, Janice C. Redish. [Published by Intellect, Limited, Oct 1999.]

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed, by Jakob Nielsen, Marie Tahir. [Published by New Riders Publishing, Nov 2001.]

Contextual Design: A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs, by Hugh Beyer, Karen Holtzblatt. [Published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Jul 1998.]

Shaping Web Usability: Interaction Design in Context, Albert Badre. (Read chapter 1 in ACM's Ubiquity.) [Published by Addison-Wesley Longman, Incorporated, Jan 2002.]

User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach by Karel Vredenburg, Scott Isensee, Carol Righi. [Published by Prentice Hall PTR, Dec 2001.]