The value of a baseline in determining design success
Brenda Burkhart, Darold D. Hemphill, Scott Jones · 1994
This paper examines the value of a baseline for usability testing in a software development organization and the specific issues that arose during the implementation of the usability test.Specifically, this testing involved the transitioning of a character-based user interface to a graphical user interface, In order to assess the efficacy of the new design and to determine if performance improvements were achieved with the new interface, a baseline was established to enable a comparative usability assessment.This usability test focused on comparing performance on similar tasks for both interfaces.Results indicated that the new interface was faster than the old interface for similar tasks.Usability goals were established at an arbitrary 50% improvement in task time over the old system.An average of 56% improvement was achieved.Advantages of the comparative design, namely better identification of tasks to target for improvement and establishment of an archive of data, are discussed.In addition, recommendations for reducing the effort involved in staging a comparative usability test are discussed.