Thanks for Agreeing to Participate in This

Thanks for agreeing to participate in this! First off, we want you to know that anything that you say or do here will be strictly confidential. Although we’re going to report our results, your name or face won’t appear in our report and we’ll only identify you by “category,” like “mechanical engineering graduate student A.”

Usability evaluations in general seek to determine if the people who use a product or tool can do so quickly and easily to accomplish their own tasks. What we're testing here is the interface, not you. Any problems or successes you have in using it will inform us how to make the system better.

We are testing three interfaces today, all of which pull data from the same database of restaurant information. We'll be asking you to complete a series of tasks, all of which have to do with choosing a group of restaurants to include in a travel guide.

The database consists of fake data and is not a complete list of San Francisco restaurants. We ask you to remember this in the questions you'll be answering - try to judge the interface to the database and not the quality of the database itself.

You are in the no training group, which means I won't be able to give you any help with the interfaces. Please just make your way through the tasks, following the written instructions and completing the questions at the end of each task.

I'll be making some observations and can answer questions about the test itself if anything is unclear to you. I'd also like to ask you to print the results of each of your tasks by following the instructions following each task.

WHEN THE ATT EXP INTERFACE COMES UP: SAY THIS IN ADDITION TO THE PRINTED INSTRUCTIONS

One thing I'd like to add to the printed instructions you have in front of you is that the color white represents restaurants that meet all of the criteria you put into the system. The other colors represent restaurants that do not meet all of your criteria.

SETUP OF ATT EXP

1. Open atx pointing to this file: v:/travelite/tblAttExpData.txt

2. Use the default color settings in atx

3. Use the flat form web interface to order the dimensions in atx

4. Two windows present - the details view on the right hand part of the screen with Restaurant Name dragged to the leftmost column. This window should take up the full height and 3 inches of width on the right of the screen. The charts view on the leftmost part of the screen. It should take up the bulk of the screen. Use a layout of two across and three high per screen.

SETTING UP SNAG IT

1. Select image capture.

2. Select Input > Active Window

3. Output to File

4. Output > Properties

Image File: GIF

Automatic File Name: set prefix to tester ID i.e. Test3

Output Folder: W:\courses\final-projects\travelite\workspace\experiment\TestID

5. Output > Preview window OFF

6. Options > Program Preferences > Program Options > Audible Alert when: Capture is Finished

TIMING:

Start the timer for each task when the user hits the Refresh button

Stop the timer for each task when the user hits the Print button or indicates verbally that they are done. Sometimes they need to be prompted to refresh the screen or print their results.