Seminar 2 group notes

Our thoughts about the reading:

Chapter 13 - Evaluation frameworks

The chapter described the evaluation framework DECIDE, guiding you in setting up an evaluation. Good to use this to not forget about certain steps, for example ethical issues.

What are the most important steps in DECIDE? Sofie thinks identifying the practical issues is important, it’s the most obvious, but in the otherhand that might be why we need the framework....but it is important to not underestimate the problems that can come up with the evaluation.

Chapter 15

Why experts are better than users? Experts are better at finding more errors than users, are used to looking for problems, know what people do wrong etc.

We haven’t decided on an idea but Axel and Sofie talked about their idea of a family travel app and what they would want to evaluate. Both walkthroughs and heuristic evaluation could be used.

Is there an ultimate checklist for all evaluations? Different methods are better for different situations, walkthroughs for evaluating more specific things, and heuristic for more general evaluation, so might not be so worthwhile to create an almighty evaluation checklist.

Heuristic evaluation: these points about what is important design principles should be more prevalent in the overall design process, since they are a clear list of what is important in usability. But if we know what we will evaluate, maybe we focus on making certain things good and might forget about other things that might not be caught in the evaluation…?  If we know what the experts will look for we will design for that, so it is important to balance using both experts and users in evaluation, as experts can be predictable, and users are not as much.

Experts can also focus on problems that users would rarely encounter, let’s say that there is a problem that all experts see, but when doing a field study with users only encounter the problem 1 out of 10 times. Since there’s always a question about time and money, you have to take into account whether or not the problem is worth fixing. You have to find some sort of balance within the two, as with everything else here in life.