GENDER FACTOR ON THE USABILITY OF INTERACTIVE APPLICATIONS

GENDER FACTOR ON THE USABILITY OF INTERACTIVE APPLICATIONS

“ Human-computer interaction is a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and implementation of interactive computing systems for human use and with the study of major phenomena surrounding them. ”

Communication Design has a wide coverage such as animation, web design, graphic design, game design etc.. This wide coverage and also to be used by nearly all people, bring out some problems to design. Creating different interfaces for each product is the general way of solving design problems. People who are going to use the product and their basic information’s are the main points of creating interfaces. Interface design is the most important step of a Design. An interface design must be usable for the users. The ISO defines usability as “the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.” [ISO, 1998].

If there are some problems with our interface, some important problems may come out. How can we find and solve these problems? There are some ways to check the usability of a interactive design.

Qualitative research is used to determine user characteristics, goals, and context of use. User can be classified according to their age, experience, educational level or gender. I have picked the Gender Factor for my usability testing project and the end analysis. 5 male students and 5 female students.

As I picked, the Gender factor on a usability of an interactive applications, now its time to choose what interactive program to test. A chat program, a helpdesk control system or what? The interactive application, which I want to check, must be something that is using during everyday life. An interactive application that everybody has used.. I choose the ‘online flight booking system of Turkish airlines’.

Gender factor on the usability of an interactive application, how can we find this? There is some usability testing methods.

• Thinking Aloud: Test users verbalise thoughts while performing test tasks.

• Co-Discovery: Two test users explore an interface together. Insight is gained from their conversation

while performing test tasks.

• Formal Experiments: Controlled experiments, measurements, and statistical analysis.

• Query Techniques: Interviews and questionnaires.

• Observational Studies: Observations and anecdotal evidence are collected from a small number of users working on their own taks in their natural environment over a longer period.

Thinking Aloud is the testing method that I will use for my project. Because with this method finds many usability problems, finds why they occur (process data), usable early in development process, requires little facilitator expertise. But also there are some negative details with this method, the most important one is thinking aloud slows users down.

And now How to do this usability testing?

The Thinking Aloud Method ask users to tell you : what they are trying to do, things they read, questions that arise in their mind, things they find confusing, decisions they make.

Test Facilitator’s Role: Spontaneous comments from the user are best. If the user stops talking aloud, encourage them to keep up the flowing commentary with neutral, unbiased prompts: non-committal “uh huh”, “Can you say more?”, “Please tell us what you are doing now?”, “I can’t hear what you are saying”, “What are you thinking right now?”.

The Test Plan main section headings: Purpose, problem statement, user profile, method (Test Design), task list, test environment, data to be collected, Content of Report.

Analysis and Final Report, 10 Users (5 males and 5 females) will try to book a ticket on www.thy.com . I will record every user when they try to book. During this booking period, I will ask some special questions to the testing users for to understand what they think. After recording all booking periods, I will try to find the common details with males and females. Timing, common mistakes, number of achieved users, number of failed users etc. After all these analysis, I will write a final report, which is around 1000 words.

Kaynakça:

[Human Computer Interaction Lecture Notes, Version of 27 May 2008, Ao.Univ.-Prof. Dr. Keith Andrews].

[ ACM SIGCHI Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction ]

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