Friday, June 08, 2012

Survey - Usability Evaluation

This usability evaluation survey was published in my PhD. At that date there were 91 responses. Now there are 97. The 6 extra responses will also contribute because the updated survey will be published in a journal paper - Journal of Visual Languages and Computing - http://ees.elsevier.com/jvlc/. I've completed minor changes to the paper today which is called - User-Driven Modelling: Visualisation and Systematic Interaction for end-user programming. I'm the main author on that paper - much of which is based on my PhD.

The survey can be accessed at - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=A8Z1u2o5WlIphAPdzNCoeA_3d_3d

The survey is based on 2 user interface examples - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning/ELearningDemonstration1.htm and

http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning/ELearningDemonstration2.htm

The summary of the results that has been submitted to the Journal is below :-


A survey of 97 people was conducted focused on the prototype implementations. This supplemented the feedback obtained from Airbus and Rolls-Royce. This survey was conducted in order to determine what kind of diagrammatic interface might be most appropriate. Extensive consultation with engineers at Airbus and Rolls-Royce helped establish the possible interfaces that needed evaluating, as these interfaces were useful to and understood by these engineers. These possible interfaces were taxonomy, CAD style diagrammatic, flow chart (or activity diagram), UML style (entity relationship). Which was preferred depended partly on the skills and type of work of the engineers, and others surveyed, and on the type of problem to be modelled/programmed :-
Which would you consider yourself to be?
answered question 93
skipped question 4
An End-User (anyone else, familiar with computers but not in categories below) - 29.0% - 27
An Experienced Developer - 28.0% - 26
A Researcher - 32.3% - 30
Other (please specify) - 10.8% - 10

What type of visualisation is best for enabling end-user programming?
answered question 78
skipped question 19
Taxonomy (tree view) - 26.9% - 21
Diagrammatic - 37.2% - 29
Flow Chart - 37.2% - 29
Unified Modeling Language (UML) - 14.1% - 11
Other (please specify) - 12.8% - 10

Which example Program have you used?
answered question 81
skipped question 16
- 17.3% - 14
- 17.3% - 14
Neither - 43.2% - 35
Both - 22.2% - 18

Which example interface do you prefer?
answered question 75
skipped question 22
Taxonomy (tree) viewer - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning/ELearningDemonstration1.htm - 26.7% - 20
Diagrammatic Viewer - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning/ELearningDemonstration2.htm
- 17.3% - 13
Neither - 9.3% - 7                                                 
Both - 13.3%- 10
No opinion - 33.3% - 25
As a result of all the feedback from engineers and others, the main problem needing to be tackled is provision of a system that moves this theoretical and prototyped work on to a fully fledged end-user modelling system, available and usable by a wide range of people.

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