Browsing by Author "Baker, Kevin"
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Item Open Access EMPIRICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A HEURISTIC EVALUATION METHODOLOGY FOR SHARED WORKSPACE GROUPWARE(2002-02-12) Baker, Kevin; Greenberg, Saul; Gutwin, CarlGood real time groupware products are hard to develop, in part because evaluating their support for the basic activities of teamwork is difficult and costly. To address this problem, we are developing discount evaluation methods that look for groupware-specific usability problems. In a previous paper, we detailed a new set of usability heuristics that evaluators can use to inspect shared workspace groupware to see how they support for teamwork. We wanted to determine whether the new heuristics could be integrated into a low-cost methodology that parallels Nielsen's traditional heuristic evaluation (HE). To this end, we examined 27 evaluations of two shared workspace groupware systems and analysed the inspectors' relative performance and variability. Similar to Nielsen's findings for traditional HE, individual inspectors discovered about a fifth of the total known teamwork problems, and that there was only modest overlap in the problems they found. Groups of three to five inspectors would report about 40-60% of the total known teamwork problems. These results suggest that heuristic evaluation using our groupware heuristics can be an effective and efficient method for identifying teamwork problems in shared workspace groupware systems.Item Open Access HEURISTIC EVALUATION OF GROUPWARE BASED ON THE MECHANICS OF COLLABORATION(2000-10-13) Baker, Kevin; Greenberg, Saul; Gutwin, CarlDespite the increasing availability of groupware, most systems are awkward and not widely used. While there are reasons for this, a significant problem is that groupware is difficult to evaluate. In particular, there are no discount usability evaluation methodologies that can discover problems specific to teamwork. In this paper, we describe how we adapted Nielsen's heuristic evaluation methodology, designed originally for single user applications, to help inspectors rapidly, cheaply and effectively identify usability problems within groupware systems. Specifically, we take the 'mechanics of collaboration'framework and restate it as heuristics for the purposes of discovering problems in shared visual work surfaces for distance-separated groups.