Participants in a Usability Evaluation
As we have already discussed above, the aim of usability evaluation is to see
how easy users find a system to use. It is obvious, therefore, that the par-
ticipants in a usability evaluation should reflect the real users as accurately as
possible. Consequently, finding and recruiting participants can be a com-
plex process which must be planned carefully (Downton 1991:340). There
are two key factors to be remembered when selecting participants for a us-
ability evaluation:
who they are
and
how many of them are needed
.
Background of Participants
In asking who the participants are, we are concerned with those character-
istics of the participants which may have some bearing on the evaluation.
We need to ask questions such as what do they know? What skills and ex-
perience do they have? What are their ages, gender, background and level
of education? But if there is to be any point in gathering this information,
we must first know something about the real users of the system. In order
to understand the characteristics of real users, we need user profiles so that
we can select suitable participants to represent them in the usability evalua-
tion (Dumas & Redish 1993:120).
Dumas & Redish (1993:122) propose a method of creating user profiles
which involves usability experts working in conjunction with subject spe-
cialists or the actual users to define precise information relating to the users’
backgrounds. Such information includes:
work experience, e.g. job description, length of service, experience with
particular tasks
194
way which neither encourages nor discourages a particular response. On
a practical level, QUIS can be administered as a web-based questionnaire
(although this requires a specially configured web server) or as a paper-based
obtaining a student site licence which is considerably more affordable.
parable to other questionnaires such as SUMI but there is an option of
•
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
