This section presents a detailed plan for conducting usability testing on our GUI mockup.
The objective of usability testing is to identify problems in the design, improvement opportunities and understand user's behaviour.
Our test aims to evaluate three aspects of our GUI:
- Easy to navigate
- Easy to complete tasks
- Functionalities divided into logical units and sub-units
Given the current pandemic and time limit, we chose to conduct usability testing through a remote questionnaire.
The questionnaire will present a series of simple tasks that need to be completed using the GUI mockup.
Previously, we designed 5 mockups: Homepage, Player Page, Game Page, Community Page, Account Settings and Search Bar.
In the questionnaire, each mockup is shown as an image and tasks are presented to participants in the form of multiple choice questions.
There are two types of multiple choice questions:
1. Difficulty rating
In this type of question, participants are asked to rate how difficult they found to complete the task using the mockup. The rating scales are shown below.
We chose to use the following scale instead of the generic scale (very easy, easy, neutral, difficult, very difficult)
as it is more tailored to our test and it is easier for participants to relate to. An example question would be 'If you wanted to add games using this webpage, how difficult would you find this task?'.
0: Very easy
1: Easy but not obvious
2: Took some time to figure out
3: Quite difficult
4: Very difficult
5: Impossible
2. Correct or Incorrect answers
In this type of question, multiple options for completing the task are presented to participants. There is only one correct answer. An example question would be 'If you wanted to navigate to Homepage from here, where would you click?'
For multiple choice questions, user experience is evaluated using a quantitative approach. The success and failure criteria are defined below:
| Difficulty rating questions | Correct/incorrect questions | |
|---|---|---|
| Success | Ratings 0, 1 and 2 | Correct option only |
| Failure | Ratings 3, 4 and 5 | Incorrect options |
We have also chosen to include qualitative answers, which aims to identify informative insights into user experience and participant's behaviour. An example question would be 'What did you find difficult or do you have any improvement suggestions?'
We chose to primarily focus on a demographic of those between 18-25 when advertising our questionnaire as we believed this age group would be the most likely to use the system we were testing and additionally are legally old enough to participate. Personal details such as age, gender and nationality and other potentially identifying characteristics were not recorded, meaning that we did not have to consider GDPR.
In the interest of fair and equal representation the questionnaire was distributed in groups of approximately similar numbers of male and female users. Despite the main demographic who typically play the sort of board and card games displayed on our game collection and management system identifying as male, there is still a contingent of female identifying players. A survey detailed in the article "Who's at the table? Board Game Players and Communities" showed that 69% of players were male and 27% were female. https://www.meeplemountain.com/articles/whos-at-the-table-board-game-players-and-communities/*
Finally we chose to design the questionnaire such that those with minimal computer background could fill in the questionnaire and give their assessment of the usability of our system, as we want to ensure that there will be no barrier to access the system.
Quantitative and qualitative result analysis
Once we have received responses for our questionnaire we intend to analyse the data as follows:
- For quantitative data gathered such as 0-5 ratings and correct/incorrect answers we intend to apply statistical methods to ascertain an appreciable assessment of the usability of our system.
- For qualitative data we intend to implement a word cloud to determine the primary feelings of users towards the system and additionally intend to inspect the qualitative responses of users to establish their experience and any insights they may have regarding the improvement of the system.