Seminar 2, individual notes.

Chapter 13: An Evaluation Framework

The first chapter this week was mostly regarding the evaluation framework, DECIDE. This framework works as a guideline for when conducting an evaluation.

DESIDE stands for:

Determine the goals, Explore the questions, Choose the evaluation methods, Identify the practical issues, Decide how to deal with the ethical issues and Evaluate, analyze, interpret, and present the data.

Since every change could impact the other evaluation methods, it is essential that you work your way back and fourth between the different methods. So the order in which you start your progress through the evaluation isn’t relevant in this case.

The chapter also describes the value in pilot studies when it comes to consider the practical issues one might encounter during an evaluation. This is because when dealing with expert evaluators one might look past the most obvious of problems, that the common users will encounter.

Chapter 15 Evaluation: Inspections, analytics and models.

Initially this chapter describes the Heuristic Evaluation, which is an usability inspection method. It is mainly used as, with all evaluation methods, a method to find problems associated with usability within a certain design.

This method also highlights the use of experts during an evaluation and which makes common users unnecessary for this process, that these experts can through following these heuristics and comparing them to the actual design and interface itself collect valuable information for the evaluation.

The chapter also has a look on walkthroughs, which can be divided into cognitive- and pluralistic walkthroughs. Walkthroughs are basically methods where you take the interested parties of the development team on a journey through the design, where they can during the same time comment and find problems that might occur for the users. The main difference between these two usability inspection methods is whether or not you need the users to evaluate the design.

A thought from myself here is that experts might (as mentioned in my summary of chapter 13) “look past the most obvious of problems, that the common users will encounter”, which makes it important to also take, once again, the value of pilot studies with common users into consideration.