Project Proposals for Dat4
Spring 2010
Research Group: The HCI Group (in the Information Systems research
unit)
Supervisor: Jan Stage <jans@cs.aau.dk>
Project-related Course: SOE
Project proposals:
1. Agile development and usability evaluation
2. Reducing usability testing efforts
3. Remote usability testing
Slides from the presentation: pdf version
here
1. Agile Development and Usability Evaluation
Combine an agile development method like XP or SCRUM with a method for
usability evaluation and use it in the development of a software system.
A project within this topic could involve one or more of these activities:
- Tailor your own method by combining agile development methods with
usability evaluation methods
- Develop a software system while using your development+evaluation method
- Study agile development and usability evaluation in a real software
development organization
2. Reducing Efforts in Usability Evaluation
Most software developers and managers of development organizations agree
that a usability evaluation is the best way to determine whether the prospective
users are able to apply a software system in the way it was intended. The
only problem is that the evaluation takes too long. A typical usability
evaluation can take one to two months and the required efforts easily amounts
to 150 man-hours. Too many projects are unable to allocate this amount
of time and resources to a usability evaluation. There have been different
attempts to solve this problem. One of the most promising techniques is
heuristic inspection. It takes considerably less time, but the problem is
that it finds too many false positivites (potential problems that users don't
really experience).
In the HCI Group, we have generated different ideas for reducing the efforts
involved in a usability evaluation. One of these is called IDA (Instant
Data Analysis). The idea is to replace the systematic data analysis, that
is one of the most time-consuming elements in a traditional evaluation,
with a structured debate, where a moderator facilitates a discussion of
key usability problems between the test monitor and the logger. This technique
is presented in an article (pdf file available here
).
A project within this topic could involve one or more of these activities:
- Experiments with IDA - develop a system and evaluate its usability or
compare it with other methods for faster usability evaluation
- Development of a new method for faster usability evaluation
- Survey of literature on reducing efforts
3. Remote Usability Testing
Make a comparative study of selected remote usability evaluation methods.A project within this topic could
involve one or more of these activities:
- Survey of experiences from practice with remote methods
- Conduct an experimental evaluation with one or more remote methods
- Conduct a real usability evaluation with a remote method in
collaboration with a development organization