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Making use of business goals in usability evaluation: an experiment with novice evaluators

Published: 06 April 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The utility and impact of a usability evaluation depend on how well its results align with the business goals of the system under evaluation. However, how to achieve such alignment is not well understood. We propose a simple technique that requires active consideration of a system's business goals in planning and reporting evaluations. The technique is tested in an experiment with 44 novice evaluators using think aloud testing. The evaluators considering business goals report fewer usability problems compared to evaluators that did not use the technique. The company commissioning the evaluation, however, assesses those problems 30-42% higher on four dimensions of utility. We discuss how the findings may generalize to usability professionals, and how the technique may be used in realistic usability evaluations. More generally, we discuss how our results illustrate one of a variety of ways in which business goals and other facets of a system's context may enter into usability evaluations.

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  • (2023)Making Usability Test Data Actionable! A Quantitative Test-Driven Prototyping ApproachExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3585659(1-6)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Usability inspection: Novice crowd inspectors versus expertJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2021.111122183(111122)Online publication date: Jan-2022
  • (2021)Relation Artefacts Type IIIHuman Work Interaction Design10.1007/978-3-030-71796-4_5(81-105)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2021
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2008
1870 pages
ISBN:9781605580111
DOI:10.1145/1357054
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 April 2008

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Author Tags

  1. business goals
  2. context information
  3. think-aloud testing
  4. usability evaluation
  5. usability problems

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CHI '08 Paper Acceptance Rate 157 of 714 submissions, 22%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Making Usability Test Data Actionable! A Quantitative Test-Driven Prototyping ApproachExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3585659(1-6)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2022)Usability inspection: Novice crowd inspectors versus expertJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2021.111122183(111122)Online publication date: Jan-2022
  • (2021)Relation Artefacts Type IIIHuman Work Interaction Design10.1007/978-3-030-71796-4_5(81-105)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2021
  • (2020)The Impact of Thinking-Aloud on Usability InspectionProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33978764:EICS(1-22)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2020
  • (2020)Ordinary User Experiences at WorkACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/338608927:3(1-31)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2020
  • (2017)Usability TestingThe Wiley Handbook of Human Computer Interaction10.1002/9781118976005.ch14(255-275)Online publication date: 28-Dec-2017
  • (2016)The trade-off between usability and security in the context of eGovernmentProceedings of the 30th International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference: Fusion!10.14236/ewic/HCI2016.36(1-13)Online publication date: 11-Jul-2016
  • (2016)Facilitating redesign with design cardsProceedings of the 28th Australian Conference on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/3010915.3010921(452-461)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2016
  • (2016)Escaping the Trough: Towards Real-World Impact of Tabletop ResearchInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2016.120676433:2(77-93)Online publication date: 3-Aug-2016
  • (2015)From User-Centered to Adoption-Centered DesignProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2702123.2702412(1749-1758)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2015
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