Assignment 6: Group Usability

This was by far the most meticulous and laborious assignment, but it was also the one that we had the most productive output from our peers. To start off, it combined almost every element of SI422's curriculum: the interview process, the micro-usability report, the personas and scenarios and heuristics were all intertwined into one macro-project. With this in mind, it was also the one that took the most hours to complete, especially because we spanned work in the course of a week.

To recap: having met up every other day, we conducted field work with our usability users and took careful observations on how they completed the scenarios we gave them. It involved elaborate setup to get the MemCatch website ready for them, as well as setting up a microphone to record the audio and using Camtasia record their on-screen actions. The Loggers took careful notes on the performance of our users and used a stopwatch to keep track of the time.

This elaborate process ended up with pages of raw data that we used to analyze the possible causes of usability violations for MemCatch, and surprisingly, it showed the mistakes we found in one user also overlapped to others. One example we had in mind was that almost everyone failed to integrate Twitter to their MemCatch account, which we initially thought was an easy process. Because it occurred consistently, we noted it to be a problem.

As time consuming as it is to set up 5 users to take a usability test, we found that it was a real life application of all the methods we learned in class over the semester, and it was a true synthesis, and also a test, for us as students to see if we really understood the variety of methods.