Evaluating Usability in Video Conferencing Service in Metso
Mia Suominen · Theseus (Ammattikorkeakoulujen) · 2013
The main target of the thesis was trying to evaluate the usability of video conferencing service in Metso. It was known that normally usability evaluations are conducted at the early phase of designing and developing a product or a user interface; however, in the thesis it was decided to implement usability evaluation methods for assessing usability of a ready product in use for several years. Questionnaire was chosen as the usability evaluation method, as it enables reaching a large group of users easily. The System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire was selected because it is free, short and quick to perform, it is not technology dependent and has references in hundreds of publications. In addition to traditional 10 items of SUS, users were requested to evaluate the userfriendliness of the system with an adjective rating scale. The respondents were also asked to give voluntary free comments regarding the service. The analysis of the responses provided a SUS score result 67. Being a numeric value it does not provide much information on its own. There were no previous scores available and therefore it was not possible to compare against previous values. If compared to an overall SUS average of 68 it can be noted the usability of video conferencing in Metso is slightly below average. If compared to benchmark the usability level is way below average. Adjective rating scale provided an average result 4.76 which can be interpreted as OK. Totally 35 respondents gave comments about the video conferencing service in general. The SUS score could have been expected to be higher as the end users were familiar with the use of video conferencing devices. The received SUS score is not very informative as such and does not provide solutions to improve the usability therefore turned out the feedback given by end users was more useful when thinking about concrete actions for improving usability level of video conferencing in Metso.