Physical and Interactive Products Usability Evaluation Method
Reem Alkadeem · 2012
The aim of this work is to develop a reliable method to evaluate the usability of electronic mobile products in the end-user market. The method proposed in this work is based primarily on subjective usability assessments using questionnaires. This paper followed a systematic approach to develop a “questionnaire” and “software tool” which is tailored to measure the usability of physical and interactive products. Mobile Phone is taken as a case study in this work. Mobile Phone Usability Questionnaire (MPUQ) is developed to evaluate the usability of mobile phones for the purpose of making decisions among competing variations in market, and hence finding the weak points in a certain product to strengthen these points in the next release. Another yield of this work is a statistical model derived from well programmed software “Usability Evaluator” to generate a composite score of usability based on the response data from the usability questionnaire. The developed method was implemented and tested against its validity to evaluate usability of both software and physical products represented by mobile phones. The proposed method can serve as a diagnostic tool that provides information about the usability of specific dimensions of physical products and interactive products and related interface elements.