Usability Week 6 and 7

In the last 2 weeks we were tasked to analyze the data from the usability study and create a final report. Pretty much we had to wrap up everything we did for this class in a nice paper.

Overall I enjoyed this class. I conduct a lot of usability studies through my work so most of the stuff that we talked about in this class was not new to me but it was nice to see it applied differently than what I work with every day. Also I don't write up actually business reports often, instead I do presentations of results. Writing reports for this class was helpful just to get a different aspect of presenting data to he client. Overall the class was a good experience and I enjoyed it.

Usability Week 5

This week was interesting in my usability class. I had to conduct a usability study on the Papa John's ordering website. It was interesting but I have had a number of challenges that I am still having issues with. First off it was difficult to get someone to sit down and take time to run the study for me. Finally I was able to get one of my friends to assist me. The first attempt I did went off very well and I was able to complete the session smoothly and get my data. Then I realized after I completed it that I didn't do a screen capture of the session.

Upon trying to do a second session with screen capture we found the site down for maintenance and upon checking on it every half hour, I have found the site still not working properly. I am still waiting to get it to work properly. I unfortunately don't have time anymore to run another session with my participant so my plan is to use to audio recording I have of the complete session to guide a screenshot capture. Basically create a visual for the audio I have. Luckily my participant did very well at describing his methods that I can do this. In a real life scenario I would just use the data that was available to me and not try to recreate a visual file, but due to the fact these visual files are needed for next week I will make sure there is a file to work off of. This task has been a lot more frustrating than I was expecting.

Usability Week 4

Week 4 of our class focused on qualitative and quantitative measures. In my experience with research I have done both qualitative and quantitative measures. I personally like quantitative measures over qualitative since having data in numbers is more efficient to crunch numbers. Although, in my experience qualitative measures are helpful in supporting what the quantitative data finds.

This week I also did some research on facial expressions and found a really cool software made by Noldus. It uses a camera to view a person's face and automatically analyzes the facial expressions. The software looks like it would be fun to use and be very beneficial to any study that is trying to use facial recognition as a measure.

Usability Week 3

This week in our usability class we worked on screening questions and task lists. Both are quite important when it comes to doing a usability test. Screening questions to make sure your participants are representing the right demographic, and task lists are created to make sure you are having your participants testing the usability of your program as efficiently as possible.

This week our task was to work in groups to complete question development for screening questions and task lists. Honestly I found the group work a little confusing. Other than sharing possible questions for each person's final list, there wasn't really much discussion. Given there was not much time for discussion either. I find it a little difficult for group work on an online course. If group work is not specified its hard to get all participants involved equally.  Luckily I was able to use the initial input of my group members to create my final lists.