Reliability of Usability Evaluation Methods

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INTRODUCTION

With increasing importance given to the product’s user experience in the recent days, it is essential to discuss about the reliability of usability evaluation methods. Usability evaluation methods are mainly used for identifying problems and assigning severity to them which will help the development teams in fixing the usability issues by priority. As we can see the final product usability depends a lot on the results of a usability evaluation and there has been a debate on the reliability of the evaluation methods which we have been using for long. In this paper I will be primarily discussing about the reliability of most commonly used evaluation methods (expert review, usability testing) and also discuss on the impact of evaluators experience on the usability evaluation. In the end this paper will include takeaways for the practitioner to follow in order to create increased reliability in the usability evaluation method being followed.

RELIABILITY OF USABILITY EVALUATION METHOD

Reliability of a usability evaluation method is measure of consistency in the results when used by different set of practitioners. In an ideal scenario we would expect usability evaluation methods results are independent of practitioners who use them and product being evaluated (Hartson, Andre, & Williges, 2001). But various studies have been performed to show that results varied significantly, and there has been no consensus amongst practitioners on major issues like: number of participants to choose for usability evaluation, when to use heuristic evaluation, when to use expert reviews etc. Usability practitioners new to the industry tend to go by the results of prior research conducted in these areas. Such use of prior experimental rese...

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