The use of think-aloud evaluation methods in design

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on two studies in which teams of two or three trainee designers evaluated a user interface by observing a user working through some set tasks. These users were instructed to think aloud as they worked. The instruction received by the designers took the form of a brief how-to-do-it manual. Study 1 demonstrates that this method is effective. Study 2 found that more problems were detected by the designers of the system than other groups. Also, designers cannot predict the problems users will experience in advance of user testing.

REFERENCES

• 1: William L. Bewley , Teresa L. Roberts , David Schroit , William L. Verplank, Human factors testing in the design of Xerox's 8010 “Star” office workstation, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, p.72-77, December 12-15, 1983, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/800045.801584]
• 2: John D. Gould , Stephen J. Boies , Stephen Levy , John T. Richards , Jim Schoonard, The 1984 Olympic Message System: a test of behavioral principles of system design, Communications of the ACM, v.30 n.9, p.758-769, Sept. 1987 [doi>10.1145/30401.30402]
• 3: John D. Gould , Clayton Lewis, Designing for usability: key principles and what designers think, Communications of the ACM, v.28 n.3, p.300-311, March 1985 [doi>10.1145/3166.3170]
• 4: Peter Wright , Andrew F. Monk, Evaluation for design, Proceedings of the fifth conference of the British Computer Society, Human-Computer Interaction Specialist Group on People and computers V, p.345-358, February 1990, Univ. of Nottingham
• 5: Wright, P. C. Monk, A. F. & Carey, T. (1989) Cooperative evaluation: The York manual. Technical report, Dept of Psychology, York UK.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Performance, Theory