EMPIRICAL DEVELOPMENT OF A HEURISTIC EVALUATION METHODOLOGY FOR SHARED WORKSPACE GROUPWARE
Date
2002-02-12
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Abstract
Good 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.
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Computer Science