Parcticipants needed for Web-based study

[alihosseinikhayat]

Hi everyone,

The following information is in regards to a study being conducted at
the University of Calgary, Department of Computer Science for the
purpose of a master's thesis. The study will be conducted by Ali
Hosseini-Khayat a Masters student at the University of Calgary. For
further details and inquiries please refer to the contact details at the
end of this email.

Summary

A study is being conducted in order to evaluate the usefulness and
effectiveness of automatically collected usability data and it's
visualizations for the designer of a prototype. Usability data has been
automatically collected by a custom Wizard of Oz usability testing tool.
The collected data needs to be presented in a meaningful way to aid in
the detection of usability flaws. You will be evaluating multiple
representations and visualizations of that data.

We ask that you attempt to identify usability flaws using the different
visualizations. This is followed by a short survey. Each of the 9 study
questions should take about 2-3 minutes and the survey should take 5
minutes.

Please note that participation will in no way affect your position of
employment and that your employer will not be informed or know of your
participation or lack thereof.

Participation

If you would like to participate in this survey please direct your
browser to the following URL:

http://ciase.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/Study
<http://ciase.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/Study>

Thank you for your time.



Further details are provided below.

Motivation

This study is being conducted in order to evaluate the usefulness and
effectiveness of automatically collected usability data and it's
visualizations for the designer of a prototype. Use of low-fidelity
prototypes and testing techniques such as Wizard of Oz testing can help
enable Agile teams to perform usability testing on a limited budget and
timeline. By conducting distributed tests over the Internet some of the
overhead involved with executing usability tests is reduced. However,
the effectiveness of distributed testing in comparison to collocated
testing may also be reduced due to limited feedback from the test
participant. This thesis presents ActiveStory Enhanced, a tool that
provides designers with the ability to easily and naturally create
low-fidelity prototypes and subsequently conduct Wizard of Oz usability
tests in an automated and distributed fashion. Usability data is
collected during tests sessions (with the participant's knowledge) and
sent back to the designer to help evaluate the usability of their
interface. This study is being conducted in order to evaluate the
usefulness and effectiveness of the usability data and it's
visualizations for the designer.

Task Overview

You will be presented with 9questions that provide some form of
usability data or visualization designed to aid you in detecting a
usability flaw in a prototype. Questions consist of images, charts and
short video clips (1 min max.) The final question is a short survey
where you can rate each of the features you used.



If you have any further questions or want clarification regarding this
research and/or your participation, please contact:

Ali Hosseini-Khayat, Department of Computer Science, University of
Calgary, hosseisa {at} ucalgary.ca

or Dr. Frank Maurer, Department of Computer Science, University of
Calgary,  (403)-220-5454  (403)-220-5454 , fmaurer {at} ucalgary.ca