Saturday, June 30, 2007

Cognitive Walkthrough for the Web

I'm still laying the groundwork for the Mobile Website Usability study. Reading in the SIGCHI 2005 conference proceedings, I came across "Tool for Accurately Predicting Website Navigation Problems, Non-Problems, Problem Severity, and Effectiveness of Repairs." Written by Marilyn Hughes Blackmon, Muneo Kitajima and Peter G. Polson, the abstract states; "We conclude that CWW has high psychological validity, because CWW gives us (a) accurate measures of problem severity, (b) high success rates for repairs of identified problems (c)high hit rates and low false alarms for identifying problems, and (d) high rates fo correct rejections and low rates of misses for identifying non-problems." Reading through the first few pages of the paper, this may be a good way to weed out non-issues on the Mobile Website Usability Study. As we dig into the sites, our perception on issues may interfere with the true numbers and I'd like to keep them as "clean" as possible. Much of the data at first glance looks to cover headings and links. Will this work for actual navigation? We'll have to try it out and see.

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Thursday, June 14, 2007

Smartphone Usability Supporting Documents

Continuing to research Smartphone Usability and developing possible tasks and sites to conduct the test on. Meanwhile, also searching for supporting documentation and similar studies. I've come across the following:

Usability in mobile interface browsing - Meikang Qiua,, Kang Zhang and Maolin Huang
This study is a strong start but there are several differences between this study and the one I am proposing. They used emulators and only conducted tests on reading documentation rather then complete tasks. The test I am drafting will be to complete everyday tasks on an actual smartphone.

How Younger and Older Adults Master the Usage of Hyperlinks in Small Screen Devices - Martina Ziefle, Ulrik Schroeder, Judith Strenk and Thomas Michel
Just found this document so I still need to read through it however the title seems promising to provide some base numbers and reference points.

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