The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design

By Deborah J. Mayhew

Chapter 16: Iterative Detailed User Interface Design Evaluation

Chapter 16: Iterative Detailed User Interface Design Evaluation

Purpose

The purpose of the Iterative Detailed User Interface Design Evaluation task is to further refine the product Detailed User Interface Design, which was specified in the previous task based on the Conceptual Model Design and the Screen Design Standards, and which is now under development. In addition, during this evaluation task the main focus is to evaluate the final interface against usability goals (see Chapter 4 ), and usually (when performance goals have a higher priority than satisfaction goals), timing data is the key data being collected. Formal evaluation is much more objective than just doing a demo and asking for subjective feedback.

Because thorough evaluation of the Conceptual Model Design and the Screen Design Standards has already been conducted (see Chapters 10 and 13 ), evaluation at this level in most cases should reveal only simple, cosmetic problems at the detailed screen design level, rather than basic flaws at the level of general user interface standards. Such problems should be relatively easy to fix, so even though evaluation is being conducted after real code has been built, implementing design changes at this time is usually still very cost effective.

Recall that during the Conceptual Model Design and Screen Design Standards levels in the design process of the overall lifecycle, only subsets of total product functionality were designed, built, and evaluated. Thus, another purpose of this later evaluation task is simply to widen the scope of usability evaluation to...

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The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design

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Chapter 16: Iterative Detailed User Interface Design Evaluation

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