Undo and Erase Events as Indicators of Usability Problems
Venue
Proceedings of SIGCHI 2009, ACM, N/A
Publication Year
2009
Authors
David Akers, Matthew Simpson, Robin Jeffries, Terry Winograd
BibTeX
Abstract
One approach to reduce 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. Our evaluation also compares problems identified
using undo and erase events to problems identified using the user-reported critical
incident technique [CITE]. In a within-subjects experiment with 37 participants,
undo and erase episodes together revealed over 80% of the problems rated as severe,
one third of which would not have been discovered by self-report alone. Moreover,
problems found by all three techniques were rated as significantly more severe than
those identified by only a subset of techniques. These results suggest that undo
and erase events will serve as a useful complement to user reported critical
incidents for low cost usability evaluation of design-oriented applications like
Google SketchUp.
