EECE418 Project Paper Prototype

Team 2: Portable Digital Photo Album

I. Evaluation Team Info

Name

Leung, Wilson

Siu, Nelson

Yiu, Chung Man (Charles)

Ziraknejad, Nima

 

II. Evaluated Project Info

 

Group 3 - myUBC Web Portal Paper Prototype

III. List of Heuristics

 

The following list of heuristics have been adapted or taken from the notes created by Dr. Kellog Booth as well as Dr. Sid Fels.

 

  1. Visibility of System Status - The system should always keep users informed about what is going on
  2. Path clarity to goal - The user should be able to determine how to achieve a desired goal at any step when using the interface
  3. Clarity of action consequence - The user should be able to determine the resulting actions by the system upon activating a function
  4. Availability of choices - The user should have a variety of choices available to accomplish a task
  5. Conceptual Model - The interaction analogy being used to represent tasks and functions should be coherent and easily understandable
  6. User Control/Freedom - The user should feel in control of the system. When a mistake is committed, there should be an undo/redo function available
  7. Consistency - The users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing.
  8. Error Prevention - The system should attempt to warn users of potential errors.
  9. Recognition not recall - Instructions for the use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
  10. Flexibility and Efficiency - The user should have different methods of performing tasks, depending on their skill level and expertise.
  11. Aesthetics - The interface should be cleanly designed and not cluttered. Information should be readily visible.
  12. User assistance with Errors - The interface should present error messages should be expressed in plain language, and help the user with recovery.
  13. Help and Documentation - The interface should present help information and in context assistance when needed.

Severity scale:
3 = Major usability problem

2 = Minor usability problem

1 = Cosmetic problem or nuisance issue

0 or blank = no problems

Extent scale:
3 = Widespread

2 = Several places

1 = Single case

0 or blank = no problems

IV. Evaluation Team's Findings

 

Team Evaluation | Comments

 

Individuals:

Note: The steps used in the evaluations were derived from Group 3's paper prototype numbering and lettering scheme.

V. Summary / Remarks

 

The evaluators felt the general feel of the interface is an improvement upon the existing myUBC portal. During our evaluation we paid additional attention to the areas brought up by the team as areas for targeted improvements. The design goals section of the paper prototype highlighted the team’s desire to work on the portal’s aesthetics and efficiency.

The aesthetics of the interfaces have been improved somewhat with the use of icons in denoting the added save, reset, and preview functionalities. Other than the addition of the icons though, we failed to spot a drastic departure from the existing myUBC portal’s design. The content icons are a welcomed addition to the interface, and is a marked improvement upon the tedious channel addition method of the existing interface. Overall the evaluators were unable to spot any major changes to the existing portal’s “look and feel.”

We see the team has focused on improving the efficiency of the interface, and specifically the column moving problem as noted in the design goals section. By allowing for a dragging method of exchanging columns, the operation has indeed become easier for the user. The team has nevertheless introduced an equally serious efficiency problem with the addition of the resize functionality. Users were unable to tell how much resizing will occur when one of the column resize buttons were pressed. If a user wanted to expand the column by a large amount, will they have to press it repeatedly? The trade-off between fine adjustment granularity versus rapid size changes was not address.

Following on the with the resize operation. The evaluators noticed a lack of consistency in the operation and conceptual model of the interface. As a quick example, the column resizing is done via a dragging modality, yet the resizing is done using a button to change the size discretely. One might have expected the column size to be adjustable via rubber banding as a parallel to the column dragging operation, and presents a point of confusion for the user.

A big issue across all the evaluators was the ambiguities of the save operation. There was no feedback as to whether a page was saved upon the invocation of the save function. Furthermore, if a user made changes to a page and exited the customization pages, are the changes saved? Will the user be asked whether they would like to save the changes? The team experimented with the existing portal and found that indeed any changes made to the layout are permanent and saved automatically. This behaviour violates the error prevention criterion fundamentally. In the case where a user had made a number of large changes to the interface and decides to not keep them, there is no way they can undo the changes efficiently or simply.

As a final note, the evaluators noticed that the “add page” tab has no path through the flow charts. This is a problem because we were not able to explore that path during the evaluation. We foresee problems with this path of execution because if changes were made to an existing page when the function is invoked; will the changes be saved automatically? Will the user be asked? The behaviour of the system under this circumstance was unclear and undefined.

 
~End of Heuristic Analysis~

Last edited on May 9, 2004 4:38 AM