Interface Design and Usability
page 2
What does usability measure to find out if a site is effective?
- Ease of learning
- Efficiency of use
- Memorability
- Error frequency and severity
- Subjective satisfaction
What can you use to measure usability?
Any web surfer can ask some simple questions to evaluate the usability of a web page. See http://www.hsl.unc.edu/lm/eval/Nuts.htm#Usability for a list of common questions.
Usability researchers and experts conduct user surveys, traffic analyses and eye movement studies.
User surveys
Asks people to answer questions about a site and rate the site's features. See http://www.lap.umd.edu/QUIS/index.html
Traffic analyses
Looks at how many visitors come to the site, how long they stay on each page, and the last page they see before they click away to other sites.Eye movement studies
Eye movement studies use cameras to track a website user's eyeballs to learn how a person looks at a website.
Here's an example of an eye-movement
study.
This was done at the Interaction Design
Lab at the
School of Information and Library Science here at UNC-CH.
The researcher wanted to know how a person viewed an online table of statistics.
You can watch a video of how
this experiment works.
See http://ils.unc.edu/idl/details/eyetracking/eyetrack.MPG
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Usability
lecture home | JOMC
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by Anton Zuiker,
updated 7/14/03 for JOMC 50 Fall 2003