A New Technique for Early User Evaluation of Entertainment Product Interfaces
Jhdm Joyce Westerink, P.J. Rankin, G.M.M. Majoor, P.S. Moore · Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting · 1994
Multimedia offers a bewildering range of alternative product designs to entertain the consumer. Early evaluation by users can guide the completion of a balanced design and appropriate interface, if sensitively handled. The relative incompleteness of early prototypes, however, is often an obstacle to engaging real users in a deep evaluation and therefore reduces the choice of suitable evaluation methods. In this paper, we discuss the merits and drawbacks of a known method (the Co-Discovery method), as well as present and discuss a new method (the socalled listener technique). We find that both hands-on and hands-off user confrontation generate valuable input to the (re-)design process, though of different kinds, and the CoDiscovery method is very successful in this respect. The new listener technique turns out to be of great help in eliciting the users' summarized impressions of the product concept in their own terminology.