Group 7 : OrientExpress Blog

Totally five MSc Web Technology students were invited to take part in the usability evaluation of our application software. All of them have learnt the course “INFO6002 Assistive Technologies and Universal Design” and have some experience on the usability evaluation of software. The detailed information of them is listed at the bottom of this article.

Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use. Therefore, according to the Alertbox’s usability definition, five quality components are set as the criteria to evaluate the usability of this software application. And the grade and mark range are explained as below:

A+ : Extremely Outstanding
A : Excellent
B : Good
C : Just Ok
D : Poor

Then the evaluation reviews from the five testers are summarized as below.

(1) Learnability
It is easy for the user to perform most of the basic tasks such as sign up or login, rank the contacts and view friend’s profile, history information and social networking information. It may take some time for the users to learn the location sharing function. Hence the learnability of Adobe Reader is excellent.

(2) Efficiency
Once the user learnt the design, it will take little time for the user to perform other tasks for example edit the personal information, share the location information with friends, view the photos, status, news or notes of friend’s social networking account etc. So the efficiency of this software is good.

(3) Memorability
After a period of time of not use, it is very easy for the users to establish proficiency again. Therefore the menorability of RankFirst is outstanding.

(4) Errors
User will make little errors when using this software to rank and view the contacts, but may make errors when sharing the location information with different friends. Fortunately, it is not difficult to recover from the errors. Hence the errors performance of this software is medium.

(5) Satisfaction
Most of the people think it is a pleasant experience when using this software to visualize the relationship with the user’s closest friends and bring close friend even closer. Hence the satisfaction of RankFirst is good.

Tester List:

Chengqi Wang (cw5g11@ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Bin Cai (bc2e10@ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Ran Ding (rd4g11@ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Ming Wen (mw7g11@ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Feng Wang (fw3e11@ecs.soton.ac.uk)