Notes for seminar 2 - Miro

The content for the latest seminar revolves around the evaluation of a design. Evaluations can be done in many different ways, but the common denominator of all evaluations is to find out if a prototype appeals to the target group. Identifying problematic aspects is also a key goal of the evaluation step.

Evaluating a product can be done during the design process, formative evaluation, or when the product is finished, summative evaluation. There are three categories used to define different types of evaluation methods. Evaluating with users in a controlled setting or a natural setting describes the first two. The third is an evaluation made in any setting without involving any users. Depending on the product and the aspect being evaluated one should choose a fitting category. In the case of our idea, an evaluation made in a controlled environment with a user would provide us with interesting information regarding the usability of the application and its interface. However, this might remove the aspect of the ecological validity, since the user isn't affected by the potentially stressful environment the app would be used in with a natural setting.

The content of chapter 14 describes the process of doing usability testing. If we were to do an evaluation, this chapter should be a big part of our focus. Many of our thoughts during the design process have revolved around making the interface as easy as possible to use, while also providing a fairly wide variety of different functions. Measuring the amount of time it takes a user to complete a task and observing the user's navigation of the interface could provide us with data showing potential changes needed in the design. We could also benefit from hypotheses testing. During the design process, we chose to go with a certain interface based on our own justifications of what we thought would be easier for the personas. A test of these hypotheses might be in order, after all we could be wrong.

Chapter 15 revolves around methods of evaluating a product by understanding users, not by involving them in the evaluation itself. A couple of methods are presented, the one I see most fit do discuss is heuristic evaluation. This method of evaluation uses the help of experts to evaluate certain criterias a product should fulfill. The criterias are called heuristics  and are generally different depending on the type of product. I believe this method is of certain use to us even though we might lack the resources needed to hire an expert. When searching for smartphone heuristics, several documents and presentations show up and they all describe valid and important things to consider when designing a smartphone application, can we use these to evaluate our design from a different perspective than our own? This is my question for this seminar.