Usability II week 2

This week we had to set up a usability study with the help of a site called Loop 11. This was my first time using Loop and I found some things very frustrating about the program. Other than the obvious issues that occurred, some other things that really frustrated me about the program. First of all there was absolutely no ability to edit the study once published. I feel like this is a huge over-site especially for first time users. It would be nice to have the opportunity to change questions or orders of sets after publication. It would also be nice to have a better format for demographic questions, and post test questions instead of clumping everything together. I was also thinking it would be nice to have some pre-made demographic questionnaires such as gender or age that can be easily popped into any experiment. These questions are used a lot and so it would be nice to not have everyone spend the time creating them.

In the end my experiment that I created is not working 100% and it is very frustrating for me to experience this after spending a lot of time trying to figure out the system in the first place. While Loop 11 is a great idea, I think they need a lot more functionality work done before I feel that they can be reliable. I will probably have to redo my assignment, which makes this whole experience that much more annoying. :-/

Usability II Week 1

This week I was able to get an introduction into my second class for the semester, Usability II. It looks like this class will take a little bit different approach from my class earlier this semester. We are getting more into the actual tools that we can use to run a usability study. This week we looked a two different types of recruitment websites that can be used to recruit participants for usability studies. One the them was a site called Ethnio. I found some of the stuff it could do would be very helpful to recruit participants, especially for studies conducted online.

Another site we started to use but haven't gotten too far into yet is Loop 11. I am really excited to have the opportunity to work with this website. I have not done any user testing online so using this site will be a new experience. We will have to see where the rest of the class goes.