Undo and erase events as indicators of usability problems
Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 2009 papers
Abstract
One approach to reducing the costs of usability testing is to facilitate the automatic detection of critical incidents: serious breakdowns in interaction that stand out during software use. This research evaluates the use of undo and erase events as indicators of critical incidents in Google SketchUp (a 3D-modeling application), measuring an indicator's usefulness by the numbers and types of usability problems discovered. We compared problems identified using undo and erase events to problems identified using the user-reported critical incident technique [Hartson and Castillo 1998]. In a within-subjects experiment with 35 participants, undo and erase episodes together revealed over 90% of the problems rated as severe, several of which would not have been discovered by self-report alone. Moreover, problems found by all three methods were rated as significantly more severe than those identified by only a subset of methods. These results suggest that undo and erase events will serve as useful complements to user-reported critical incidents for low cost usability evaluation of creation-oriented applications like SketchUp.
Related Papers
- → Glimpse(2005)32 cited
- → An multiuser Undo/Redo method for replicated collaborative modeling systems(2009)6 cited
- Introducing Selective Undo Features in a Collaborative Editor(2016)
- Susquehanna Chorale Spring Concert "Roots and Wings"(2017)
- → DETERMINING QUALITY REQUIREMENTS AT THE UNIVERSITIES TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION(2018)