Overview of UX Evaluation

  • UX Objectives
  • Intro Evaluation
  • Low-cost Evaluation Methods
  • Rigorous Empirical Methodology
  • Evaluation Reporting

Major Dimensions for Evaluation Methods

  • Analytical vs. empirical
  • Informal vs. formal
  • Formative vs. summative
  • Qualitative vs. quantitative

Other schemes

Rosson and Carroll Lewis and Rieman Nielsen and Mack Preece, Rogers and Sharp
Analytical methods Evaluating without Users Formal methods Predictive / Modeling user's task performance
Informal methods Predictive / Asking experts
Empirical methods Evaluating with Users Empirical methods Usability testing
Field studies
    Automatic methods  

Preece, Rogers and Sharpe (PRS) also describe a "Quick and Dirty" evaluation paradigm, which seems to generally refer to informal empirical methods and what Hartson & Pyla call Rapid Evaluation Methods.

In chapter 8, Saffer provides a brief overview of usability testing (empirical method) and a variant of the heuristic evaluation (informal analytic method).

Discussion Questions

  • What other ways are there for characterizing evaluation methods?