Conduct a usability analysis of the following web site:

     .(to be announced after we receive human subjects approval)

1. Conduct the usability study on four people: yourself and three friends:
   1. Conduct the study on yourself without first looking through the site.  That is, the session that you run on yourself should be the very first time that you look at the web site.

   2. You may work in teams to pool the data collected by other class members, including themselves as study participants (subjects).  If you work with someone else to pool together an observation of someone who is not a class member, you are encouraged to do it together.

   3. You must obtain informed consent from each participant, including yourself.  If another class member is one of your three additional participants, then you must submit an informed consent form for that person as well.  If the data from one student is included with the data that is used for analysis by several other students, then the student would be signing an informed consent form for each of the other class members who are using the data.  That is, each student will be submitting four informed consent forms with the report.

   4. At the end of each session, you must debrief the participant if s/he is not a class member.

2. This is otherwise an individual assignment that requires you to write your own written report.

3. In conducting the usability study, use the following as your topical guide: ask each participant (subject) to answer the following questions:

   1. What is the class schedule for driver safety training?  Print it.

   2. Where is the on-campus gas station for fleet vehicles?  Print the page showing this address.

   3. Transportation Services can pick up and drop off patients of some affiliated clinics.  If you want to arrange this service in advance, what phone number would you call?  Print the page showing this phone number.

   4. Does this facility have its own truck for towing vehicles?  Print the page showing that it does or does not have this capability.

   5. Repeat the second task above.

4. Your written report must contain the following elements:

   1. research objectives

   2. methodology

   3. findings:

      1. utility (does the site do what it is apparently supposed to do?)

      2. usability (can the user easily figure out how to use the site?)

         1. ease of learning (how easily can the user learn to move around the site?)

         2. efficiency of use (e.g., how much time to complete tasks?)

         3. memorability (can the user repeat a task?)

         4. error frequency and severity (how often and how serious are navigation errors?)

      3. likeability (user satisfaction)

   4. conclusions

   5. recommendations

5. In a separate folder, include the notes of your observations of study participants (including notes of your own first use of the site).  These notes would include comments on the amount of time (in seconds) that a person required to get through various parts of the task, causes of these times (download times, errors working through links, etc.), the types of errors that a person made while trying to find information, the number of attempts that were made before success or abandonment of the assigned task, comments made by the participant regarding usability, likeability, frustration, and etc.  If you are sharing data with someone else, then include a copy of those observations.  Do NOT put the participant's name on your observation notes.

6. In another (separate) folder, include copies of the signed and dated informed consent forms.  If you are partnering with someone in sharing observations (data), you must still include a photocopy of the informed consent form in your own folder.  This folder must be separate from all other work, however, and the professor will merely look at it to ensure that you have real data and have obtained informed consent; these forms will otherwise be filed separately to be archived to meet with human subjects requirements.

References:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980503.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991212.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010121.html