A Proposed Usability Evaluation Checklist and Threshold for Interactive Systems

Abstract

Designing for maximum usability is the goal of interactive systems design, since users want interactive products to be easy to learn, effective, efficient, safe, memorable and over all; satisfying to use. Achieving this requires the product to be evaluated, but the process of evaluation can be difficult, because different evaluation methodologies require some restriction ―e.g. experienced evaluators‖ and can be more time-consuming. In addition, developers will not be able to know how their developing product compares to widely known, highly used products since the usability of an artifact is defined by the context in which that artifact is used. So there is a need to develop appropriate usability evaluation measures that allow system developers to make more informed evaluation with their own systems quickly as well as comprehensively regardless of their context. Hence, a usability evaluation checklist has been developed. The proposed checklist has been designed based on design rules in views of User Interface design elements. A hierarchical structure of UI design elements and usability principles were developed and then utilized to develop the checklist. Most usable products were included in this study to be evaluated using the developed checklist to provide the developers with a new threshold that will aid them in determining where their tested products fall within a distribution of highly used products. These products are one of the top sites on the web including YouTube, Facebook and Wikipedia. Moreover, products that are best in class and that are used in every-day life as Microsoft Office. Finally, the heading product in specific domain such as W3Schools, which is the number one online education source for beginner in Web developing. The result of the evaluation found that the agreed assessment result for the newly developed product must exceed the threshold of the proposed checklist to be considered as a usable product.