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CHI
2009
ACM

Undo and erase events as indicators of usability problems

14 years 4 months ago
Undo and erase events as indicators of usability problems
One approach to reducing the costs of usability testing is to facilitate the automatic detection of critical incidents: serious breakdowns in interaction that stand out during software use. This research evaluates the use of undo and erase events as indicators of critical incidents in Google SketchUp (a 3D-modeling application), measuring an indicator's usefulness by the numbers and types of usability problems discovered. We compared problems identified using undo and erase events to problems identified using the user-reported critical incident technique [Hartson and Castillo 1998]. In a within-subjects experiment with 35 participants, undo and erase episodes together revealed over 90% of the problems rated as severe, several of which would not have been discovered by self-report alone. Moreover, problems found by all three methods were rated as significantly more severe than those identified by only a subset of methods. These results suggest that undo and erase events will serve...
David Akers, Matthew Simpson, Robin Jeffries, Terr
Added 24 Nov 2009
Updated 24 Nov 2009
Type Conference
Year 2009
Where CHI
Authors David Akers, Matthew Simpson, Robin Jeffries, Terry Winograd
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