Course Organisation
In Weeks 6 and 7, our classroom will be the city – we are going out into Edinburgh for our class activities. Watch this space!
If you can’t see Questions and Comments or the Quiz any more after you’ve completed it, that’s because they are no longer visible to you after the due date has passed. These assignments are pass / fail, and you pass them if you complete them before the deadline. This is why I don’t allow late submissions, and once the deadline has passed, you can no longer see them in your student view.
Structure of the Session
We will be working mostly with TopHat on practical applications of user assessment techniques.
Task 1: Evaluating Hotel Booking Systems
Choose the hotel booking service with which you are most familiar. How many clicks does it take you to see a list of hotels near London King’s Cross station with free WiFi and a fitness centre? How many different web pages / app pages do you have to visit? How long (in seconds) does it take you to see this? You can do this either by yourself or in groups of 3-4, where one person does the search, one person counts clicks, one person uses a timer, and one person keeps track of pages.
For people with a HCI background: Document the choices available at each step. How can people zoom in on the desired area? What do they need to know about London to do so? If a property has a fitness centre, what do users need to do to figure out whether it has any dumbbells, or whether it just consists of cardio machines? Which kind of person would care about the quality of the hotel gym?
All of you should do the search. If you are searching in a group, then vary your destination – London King’s Cross, Leicester Square, Royal Albert Hall, Greenwich. If you are not working in a group, or if there are less than four of you, make sure that you check out every destination on different booking engines.
Is there anything you can’t find easily? Is there any information that does not appear in the list version?
If you can’t think of a booking engine, try booking.com, lastminute.com, kayak.co.uk.
Rate your booking engine on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is very bad and 5 is excellent.
Demonstration: Gray Dawes booking system (Traveldoo)
Task 2: System Usability Scale
Complete a System Usability Scale for the booking engine you tested yourself.
Demonstration: Analysis of Usability Data
Task 3: Comparing Your Findings to What Others Say
For people without an HCI background: Find the app of one of the booking engines that you examined on the App Store. What are the reviews like? Do they agree with what you’ve found?
For people with an HCI background: Draw up three personas, student on a budget, business traveller, backpacker on a gap year. What are their needs? Who could you ask to find out? Where on the Internet could you find some information without having to interview people? Work alone or in groups of 2-3.
