You are expected to analyse the object as a usability engineer would – and then write a report. This report will be broken down into the following twelve sections and marks will be allocated for each section : Norman’s usability tenets – Neilson’s attributes Vision and colour – readability and legibility Fitts’ law – and other HCI laws (Hicks etc) Use of human memory – short and long term Use of decision making – problem solving Command languages (if used) – if not why not ? Menus (if used) – if not why not ? Graphical User Interfaces (if used) – if not why not ? Metaphors – and gulfs of execution and evaluation Usability guidelines (use at least one checklist) Any other observations based on material from the course Overall usability assessment and conclusions Each student is expected to cover MOST of the above sections in their papers – you may need to drop one or two that do not apply. Dropping sections without justification will lose you marks. Be careful, most interfaces have some relationship to all of the above topics – remember whenever you make selections you are issuing ‘commands’ to a system.
