CampusAccess

The Problem
This project was completed in my design evaluation methods course. The problem presented to our team was to conduct an in depth, formal usability evaluation and heuristic analysis of Indiana University's CampusAccess Card system.

Our Process
Planning the study involved the following activities: recruiting participants, setting up a testing environment, scenario and task-based analysis, data collection using pre/post questionnaires, and usability testing.

We used Camtasia screen recording software to capture users’ mouse clicks, mouse navigation movements, and participants verbal thoughts using the think-aloud protocol. From our analysis, we revealed a number of ambiguous terms, navigation problems, and search efficiency issues.

After usability testing we performed a heuristic evaluation and did a comparison of results between both methods. Each member of our team conducted seperate evaluations following 10 heuristics by Jakob Nielsen. The individual evaluation period was 1-2 hours, taking one pass to get a feel for the website, and a second pass to focus on specific features. Our team followed up with a debriefing session to prioritize the issues.