Tablettilehtien designratkaisujen käytettävyysarviointi
Pekkala, Sami · Aaltodoc (Aalto University) · 2012
The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the usability of tablet magazines. The content of the magazines is the same, but the design solutions (layout, structure and interaction possibilities) vary. A formative usability evaluation was done to find usability problems and a summative evaluation was carried out to compare and rank the magazines. The main emphasis on usability evaluation is in user testing and eye-tracking. .The field of research is digital publishing, especially magazines for tablet computers. Print sales are declining and publishers are keen to find new means to approach the consumer. The form of digital publishing processes and business models for mobile devices have not yet been established. Web-based and image-based magazines are both common. Semi-automatic computational layout is presented as a publishing technique that can reduce the human effort of converting content into various screen sizes. Before deciding on how to publish a tablet magazine, it is important to evaluate how the different design solutions affect the usability of a magazine. A theoretical background for this study is presented in the beginning. Usability is defined to consist of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the user interface. Usability is found to be dependent on context, i.e. users, tasks and environment. Usability evaluation methods (UEM) chosen for this study include think aloud, performance measures, questionnaires and quantitative and qualitative eye-tracking analysis. The summative evaluation results of this study show that a web-based version of a magazine with dynamic, semi-automatic layout has better usability than the others. An image-based version with static manual layout is second and another version with dynamic layout is third in the terms of usability. Design solution suggestions for even more usable tablet magazine are made as a result of the formative evaluation.