Usability Workshop
The goal of this workshop: Creating the user interface of „Elektro-Müller“, an online shop for electronic products. It includes brainstorming, card sorting, prototyping and testing. A workshop in German with a group of students.
Period: October 2009 – January 2010
Brainstorming
First task is to brainstorm functionalities and menu items under certain requirements which are listed on a flip chart. Our usability team hands out cards to the group of students. Many different terms are found.
Closed Card Sorting
Prewritten cards with the terms are handed over to the test group. The group has to assign the cards to a predetermined menu. The yellow and green cards are presenting the structure of the products whereas the blue and red cards visualize functionalities and additional menus of the website.
Paper Prototypes
Next step is creating paper prototypes according to this specific task scenario: „Order a notebook from the brand ‚Acer‘ which has a maximum price of € 600.“. Two prototypes are presented on the board which shows the steps on how to find the notebook. After the presentations, our team is putting pro and contra arguments on the board to evaluate the two versions. In the end, one version will be chosen for the final prototype. The winning version includes the advantages of the other version as well.
Wireframes
A low fidelity prototype made out of wireframes will help us for the usability tests.
Usablity Tests
Now the usability of the website and the satisfaction of the user will be checked. The test person will get specific tasks to solve on the printed wireframe-prototype sheets. The navigation approach is to point the finger on the navigation elements and one of our team members changes the page. For the user, it should feel like navigating through a website. However in our test, we have only 1 solution path. With the „Thinking Aloud“ method the test person is using, our team is able to find out the users intention and satisfaction when trying to solve a task. Several criteria are logged by us.
[Usabilitytest Report (German)]
Web Usability Checklist
The Web Usability Checklist is one of several methods to check the usability of websites. It has a certain number of criteria consisting of web elements, standards and design rules. Each criterion is written in form of a question and has a scale of points.
It was the topic of my first bachelor’s thesis. I divided it into two parts:
- General information about usability and its evaluation methods (Usability Testing, Questionnaire, Heuristic Evaluation, Cognitive Walkthrough, Guidelines and Checklists).
- The checklist with its evaluation of several university websites, the result analysis and some ideas for updates.