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In my master thesis I aimed to design user interface for a website. Right now I have designed several mockups (around 25) that represent the user interface. I have to evaluate these mockups as fast as possible with the minimum amount of evaluators. Do you know how can I evaluate these mockups to check the functionality and usability concerned?

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    Use Cognitive Walkthrough method. It's rather quick and low cost and requires zero users. Also you could try Heuristic Evaluation mehod. Nov 30, 2013 at 15:38
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    @alexey kolchenko Mmmh one shouldn't do expert evaluation on your own design. I bet you won't find any critical issues ;)
    – FrankL
    Dec 1, 2013 at 11:05
  • @FrankL your remark has sense, still evaluation methods provide framework and let shift from developer view to user view. Inspection methods are good as self-checking tool, too. So for the quick and low cost evaluation for the first round I'd choose those. Dec 1, 2013 at 12:06
  • @FrankL do you know any sample case study that perform the mentioned tests? or at least can you recommend any article that it describes the steps of each test?
    – Paarmin
    Dec 1, 2013 at 17:09
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    @armin here is a thresd explaining the tests ux.stackexchange.com/questions/29481/…
    – FrankL
    Dec 1, 2013 at 17:31

3 Answers 3

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Do you have 25 different solutions for 1 website? or it's the number of screens you designed to represent a scenario? If all 25 are different solutions for 1 website, I think that you should have 3 or 4 at maximum, otherwise it's very possible that you are missing something really important about your website. Did you order the information on your website depending on your user needs? I think that could reduce the number of mockups: it will help you to exclude those that don't make sense for your user. For just usability, I suggest you to read "don't make me think" by Steve Krueg. It could help you at finding a few (fast) methods for usability evaluation. Hope that helps.

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  • No I have designed 25 screen to represent the whole function of the platform. how can i evaluate my design? ( this is the representation of what i have designed)
    – Paarmin
    Dec 3, 2013 at 10:43
  • Well, in this case try to design a scenario that you think it describes the most common tasks and see how your screens fit in this scenario. Go task by task: "Robert is a new user. He subscribes the service (task 0) and complete his profile description (task1)...." And so on. You take your screens and you look for missing functions or information. Another way to do that is to use the scenario with a real user:you will be a director and the user an actor. You will present each screen when needed and you look for any difficulty your user will face trying to accomplish the tasks.
    – Sara
    Dec 3, 2013 at 17:38
  • I Liked the second approach the most. but if i want to do it in a systematic way in your opinion is it a good way to list the main function of the platform and ask from different users to rank each function in scale of ten. by the way do you know what is this approach is called?
    – Paarmin
    Dec 4, 2013 at 17:15
  • I believe that in this way you will miss the truth because a list is somehow out of the context. It is ok to ask people what they think about functionalities, but the way you ask is really important: asking things like "Do you think this "login" button is important/easy to find/whatever?" may lead you to obvious answers as well as misleading answers. In fact, asking people to complete a task that requires to login and observe them while doing it can reveals a lot more about what's REALLY wrong/right....
    – Sara
    Dec 4, 2013 at 19:08
  • .... After completing a task you may ask qualitative questions (for ex how they felt trying to complete the task, you can be more precise asking things about that specific element) in a scale that goes from 1 to 5 (use odd numbers for scales), representing a scale between 2 opposite instances of the same category (Ease:easy VS difficult; Familiarity:familiar VS unfamiliar,and so on). Questionnaires are not enough, so cross their results with your observations and you get the best from both. You may want to read this
    – Sara
    Dec 4, 2013 at 19:17
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At first, it is very important to understand the objective of your website, and what it determines to achieve and who will be using it and why will they be using your website? And what do you want to test and why?

These are some of the basic questions to be considered during planning phase, as they will help you select an appropriate UX/Usability method.

Consider following things:

  1. Interested to evaluate navigation and information architecture of your site (mockup version site) --> If yes, Use Card Sorting, or Experience Maps
  2. You want to do objective usability inspection without a user. --> Use Expert review techniques such as Heuristic Evaluation or Cognitive Walk through
  3. You are interested to test how well users perform at your site, how many errors do they do during a certain task, their task completion rate on site. --> Use Task Analysis web usability technique, Observation and/or Interviews
  4. You are interested to test your mockup design A with mockup design B or you want to compare your mockup with a competitor's website --> Use A/B testing.
  5. You are interested to test your mockup design A with multiple mockup design (B,C--N) or multiple items on page. --> use multivariate analysis or multi-dimension comparison test.
  6. You are interested to evaluate user emotions, first impressions, attention, engagement, cognitive load satisfaction and expectations, --> Use quantitative surveys, open-ended questions, 5/2 First Impression test and/or physiological measures (eye-tracking, facial recognition, EEG brainwaves, GSR biosignals)

Hope it helps. If you have any further questions, drop me at my twitter. @Laghari_UX

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I would use usability tests as an objective way to evaluate your mockups.

There are two different kinds of testing: formative usability testing, which aims for validates a concept and finds solutions. And summative usabilty testing, which just discover problems, counts them and gives you comparable metrics.

Here are some articles explaining both in detail:

http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/2-kinds-of-usability-test.html

http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/formative-summative.php

http://dux.typepad.com/files/schrag_formativetesting.pdf

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