Notes for Seminar 2 - War

Chapter 13:

We have now in our project come to the part of evaluating our product in the design process where we in this chapter got introduced too. It introduces a process that is very important when designing a product. I personally think that the design process is the most important part in the process of creating a product. When designing a product there is a hard job of making sure that the design of the product is appealing to our target group, the usability and the user experience are great and making sure of that the requirements have been fulfilled.  A great design is often characterize by it have required many iterations until they have accomplish that design and we will evaluate our product by testing, analyze the result and making sure that every requirements have been fulfill. This approach is called iterative design and this process continuous until our product has fulfilled all our requirements and is appealing to our target group.

There are many different methods and techniques that can be used during the evaluation of our product but a good framework is the DECIDE framework and this chapter introduce us to the DECIDE framework which can be used when designing the product. The DECIDE framework can be seen as a checklist that contains a list of which we should go through each point in that checklist iterative. The Decide framework will help us with the evaluation of our product and the DECIDE framework stands for:

1. Determine the goals.
2. Explore the questions.
3. Choose the evaluation methods.
4. Identify the practical methods.
5. Decide how to deal with the ethical issues.
6. Evaluate, analyze, interpret, and present the data. 

This chapter also mentioned that we need to set up goals during the evaluation of our product, because earlier in this text I mentioned that the evaluation is an important process due to the fact that we need to get information about how well our product works, if we have fulfilled our requirements etc. We must therefore formulate questions that aim to seek answers to our questions in a way that we know if we reached our goals.

Chapter 15:

This chapter is also about evaluation but focuses on the different evaluation methods that don’t require the users presence but instead an expert’s input can be used if wanted. The book mentioned these different evaluation methods, heuristic evaluation, walkthroughs, analytics and predictive models.

The heuristic evaluation and walkthroughs are inspection methods that rely on feedback from experts rather then users. This method can be a bit hard to carry out due to the fact that it can be hard to find experts that are willing to evaluate our product. In this specific method the experts evaluate a user-interface and they will also check that the product affiliate with the usability principle know as heuristic.

The walkthrough is the alternative method to heuristic evaluation, which slowly walks though a task using the product and notes any potential problems with the product. We must also distinguish between cognitive and pluralistic walkthroughs.

The predictive models doesn’t rely on users or experts input rather you can use formulas to measure performance and you can have in mind the Fitt’s Law which can be described in interaction design as; predicts the time it takes to point at a target based in the size of the object and the distance to the object. Fitt’s law can be used to measure the usability of our product.

Illustrates the different stages in this Iterative process during the Evaluation, too illustrate the reader that evaluation is an ongoing process that will take many iterations before moving on to the next stage in developing the product. Because a product that have been through many iteration often results in that the product is of high quality.

Question: After reading this chapter I have thought on which evaluation methods we should use, some of these methods can be hard to carry out. So I wonder which evaluation method will benefit us most?

What goals should we set up when we are evaluating our product?