Teaching Usability Methods to Undergraduate Students: Can We Measure Changes in Experience?

Abstract

Instructors at the Air Force Academy recently developed an undergraduate Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) laboratory to teach basic components of HCI concepts to undergraduate students. The objective was to develop a teaching laboratory so that students would gain the necessary experience to conduct usability evaluation on local projects. The purpose of this study was to examine the changes in a student's technique of identifying usability problems while using the HCI laboratory. Thirteen students in an undergraduate HCI course participated in the study. During a pre-and post-assessment, we collected several measures in order to quantify any changes experienced by the students as they logged usability problems. These measures included attention focus, number of problems identified, word count, and use of HCI terms in describing usability problems. Results showed that the metrics of number of usability problems identified and the use of HCI technical terms were particularly sensitive to changes over the semester.

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