Usability Study Plan

Group Name: Meta Evaluation Group Members Names: Tami Saito, Terri Saragosa, Berna Souza, Patty Stemmle Research Purpose What is the problem you want to address? The problems we want to address with this study are usability issues with our Meta Evaluation website. What outcome do you hope to achieve with this project? The purpose of this usability study will be to discover areas for improvement for ease of use of our Meta Evaluation module for students of the UH Manoa ETEC program. Context of the Problem What evidence do you have that there is something that needs changing in your locus of control (from your formative evaluation)? Based on our previous formative evaluation by our expert reviewers, there were areas identified that may need improvement: audio levels, navigation and graphics Though we agree that revisions in these areas may improve the prototype, we decided that we would collect more data in a usability test before deciding what specific changes are needed and before implementing the recommendations we received in the formative evaluation feedback. What can you find from reading background literature that may help you plan your intervention? What makes you think your idea is a good one? (Refer to the class readings on usability and evaluation. Just list the APA citations and short annotation). Usability: Krug, S (2009). Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems. New Riders Publishing Thousand Oaks. Krug presents usability testing in a simple, easy-to-read fashion. He covers the basics and gives real-life examples and tips for testing usability. The book shows how doing usability testing can be an easy way to identify problems early in the design process. In Chapter 16, Krug says When fixing problems, try to do the least you can do.(p.111) and he also highlights two basic principles: Tweak, dont redesign and Take something away. (p.113). Based on that suggestion, we decided to simply re-record the audio so that the volume is appropriate and can be clearly heard. Based on the additional feedback we receive

from the usability study, we will keep simplicity in mind and try and come up with quick fixes to address identified usability issues.

Instructional Intervention Briefly, what are you going to do to fix the issue you identified above? We are going to add re-recorded audio to the website,perform a usability test, and evaluate the volume levels. What research questions do you have (provide two)? How do ETEC students at UH Manoa rate the ease of use in completing the tasks requested during the usability test of our Meta Evaluation website? How do ETEC students at UH Manoa describe the usability of Meta Evaluation website? What is your estimated time frame fixing the issue identified above? Prototype revisions will be complete by Wednesday, March 6th.

Data Gathering Tools for Usability Study Describe how you think you will develop your usability protocol. This is just to get you started thinking about your study. You will develop the actual protocol next week. We will follow the examples provided in module 9 and chapter 16 (Krug) to create our script based on our selected tasks: Describe what you see. What do you think is the first step? Find the information on the purpose of this website. What is your estimated time frame for implementing the usability protocol with real participants? We plan to implement a ten minute testing with our users by 3/17/13.

Data Analysis How will you summarize the data you collect? We will analyze and summarize data on errors, time to complete task and subjective responses and look for common themes related to usability issues. What is your estimated time frame? We plan to complete our data analysis and report by 3/22/13

Conclusion Why is this important to do?

Usability affects learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and learner satisfaction and ultimately whether the learning outcome is achieved. Who is the audience that might want to know about this? Our audience includes ETEC students at University of Hawaii at Manoa.