Making Usability Engineering a Little Easier

Tools for electronic card sorting and collecting usability test data

Todd Zazelenchuk, Ph.D., UITS, Indiana UniversityNate Johnson, UITS, Indiana University

Collecting and analyzing usability data

Measuring usability Quantitative: Effectiveness, Efficiency, Satisfaction Qualitative: Think aloud protocol, direct observation

Reasons for building the tool Collating, analyzing, and summarizing paper notes Speeding up the data analysis process Recording quantitative measures consistently Desired a cross-platform tool for our lab

Ulab data collection tool

Excel spreadsheet with VB macros Allows researcher to:

Record time per task Record observations on task performance and

behavior Record users satisfaction scores View summary charts of key usability criteria View summary of qualitative data on a per task

basis

DEMO…

Card Sorting for WWW content organization

Card sorting Used to identify users’ preferred arrangement and

naming of content for a website Users group paper index cards into piles and name them Researchers ‘eyeball’ results or perform cluster analysis

Reasons for building the tool Reduce reproduction and management of cards and data Allow remote participants to be involved Improve on stability and accessibility of current tools Improve on usability and analysis capability

Grouper: Card Sorting Tool

Java Application Requires the Java SDK 1.4 Cross platform:

• Windows, Mac OS X, Unix flavors Simple XML file format for easy incorporation

into other applications Deployed via Java WebStart Currently in an alpha state, beta coming soon

DEMO…

Questions/Comments

http://www.indiana.edu/~usable

Download tools from the Tools and Templates page Sign up to beta-test the Grouper tool on

the Sign up to Participate page

Todd Zazelenchuk, Ph.D., UITS, Indiana UniversityNate Johnson, UITS, Indiana University