iPhone app unmoderated usability study

This mobile application allows a person to view video and written content on a mobile phone. It is built to accommodate future revisions that add features, increased functionality, more videos, research topics, and blog content.

We conducted an unmoderated remote usability study to validate the navigation and features of the app prototype.

Our goals of the study were to:

• Validate ease of navigation to view content.
• Find any confusing menu functions or labels.

See the user’s tasks and results of the study.

 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) moderated usability study

This study was conducted while attending the University of Washington’s evening Masters program on Human Centered Design & Engineering.

Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) is a cloud computing service offering compute power, storage, and IT infrastructure services. AWS allows companies and individuals to essentially ‘rent’ their web infrastructure paying only for what they use as they are used, instead of purchasing and maintaining expensive in-house server networks. Our group has conducted a usability study for Amazon Web Services (AWS) aiming to test how easily customers (both new and existing) could find information on several key areas of their website.

Our goals for this study were to:

• Explore whether or not the current navigation structure and page naming system is effective and if not, why?
• Monitor the path users took to find information (without prompting).
• Look for any trouble spots.

The testing was conducted at the University of Washington LUTE lab. We asked each participant to complete several tasks such as searching for product information, resources and pricing. The tasks were mostly user generated (users were given a broad scenario rather than specific instructions) and one was an interview-based scenario, where we depended upon the participant’s individual interests, rather than assigning them. While completing each task, participants were asked to perform the “think aloud” method. At the end of the scenarios, participants filled out a post-study questionnaire and were debriefed. All participants were video taped along with a screen capture of the study.

See the full report