Reading Reflection: Usability Testing Data Analysis and Reporting

For this week’s reading, at the beginning, I was confused among informal summative evaluation (quantitative), formal quantitative analysis, and formative evaluation (qualitative). Later into the reading, I learned that informal summative evaluation provides simple statistical analysis such as mean and standard deviation in order to check whether the UX reaches the UX targets. Informal summative evaluation doesn’t include inferential statistical …

Reading Reflection: Usability Testing

We read two chapters on usability testing this week. The UX book refers usability testing as rigorous evaluation, while activities such as experts inspection and heuristic evaluation as rapid evaluation. Is the one called rigorous actually more rigorous or effective? This makes me think about Apple again. Sometimes, the experts’ experiences combined with their understanding of the users’ goals, …

Reading Reflection: Information Organization and Prototype

Information Architecture Reading from Brinck, Gergle, & Wood : 1. What is information architecture? Information architecture refers to the structure or organization of the website, especially how each page relates to each other. This involves content analysis and planning. Information architecture is rooted from database design and information retrieval, and strongly influenced by HCI, library science, and …

Reflection on iPhone App Design Session

We had a design session to sketch the interface of an iPhone app where students can view their GPA and grades. The following are the flow charts and the sketches from our team. Major take-aways from this session are: 1. It takes great level of familiarity to the elements of the phone from the designer’s …

Reading Reflection: Persona, Scenario, Goal-Directed Design

Major take-aways from this week’s reading on persona, scenario, and requirement is goal-directed design: (1) There are three different types of user goals: experience goals, end goals, and life goals. I hope we read these details at the beginning of this semester when we started to talk about goal-oriented design. Until now, I was mostly thinking …

Reflection on User Interview Questions

Our group came up with a very tentative list of questions for conducting a pilot user interview in class today. Based on Cooper, we set to understand the users’ goals rather than getting into too many particulars of the website in a limited time. We started from brainstorming our interaction with the interviewees, so you could see …

Reading Reflection: Qualitative User Research

What are the goals of user research? The first goal is to to understand users’ goals and motivations. According to Cooper, goals alway go first, and tasks second, but the UX book emphasizes the particulars of the work practices more. I feel every time I do the reading, Cooper and the UX book often have some seemingly contradictory …

Reflection on Presentation1

Our team didn’t get the chance to present, but I still feel I learned a lot about collaboration since the last two classes. I used to think that team project is kinda of time-consuming, since you have to coordinate between multiple people, and everybody has different schedule and everybody is busy. I vaguely know that …

Reading Reflection: Rapid UX Evaluation Methods

The UX book Chapter 13 discusses about rapid UX evaluation methods including walkthroughs, UX inspection, heuristic evaluation, Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE), and quasi-empirical UX evaluation, and how to conduct these methods. This is a really practical chapter! As the authors mentioned, these rapid methods or so-called “discount” evaluation methods are regarded as “damaged merchandise” when …

Reading Reflection: About Face Chap.2

Two of my major take-aways from the Cooper chapter are as follows: 1. Engineers are mathematical or programming nerds, and users should be ignorant This chapter discusses the differences among an implementation model, a represented model, and the users’ mental model. It essentially argues that the users should be shielded from the real mechanism of how the system really …