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Heuristic
Analysis Supplemental Material
1.Visibility
of system status: The system should always keep
users informed about what is going on, through appropriate
feedback within reasonable time.
2. Match between system and the real world: The
system should speak the users' language, with words,
phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than
system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions,
making information appear in a natural and logical order.
3. User control and freedom: Users often choose
system functions by mistake and will need a clearly
marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted
state without having to go through an extended dialogue.
Support undo and redo.
4. Consistency and standards: Users should not
have to wonder whether different words, situations,
or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.
5. Error prevention: Even better than good error
messages is a careful design which prevents a problem
from occurring in the first place.
6. Recognition rather than recall: Make objects,
actions, and options visible. The user should not have
to remember information from one part of the dialogue
to another. Instructions for use of the system should
be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use: Accelerators
-- unseen by the novice user -- may often speed up the
interaction for the expert user such that the system
can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users.
Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design: Dialogues
should not contain information which is irrelevant or
rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a
dialogue competes with the relevant units of information
and diminishes their relative visibility.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from
errors: Error messages should be expressed in plain
language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem,
and constructively suggest a solution.
10. Help and documentation: Even though it is
better if the system can be used without documentation,
it may be necessary to provide help and documentation.
Any such information should be easy to search, focused
on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried
out, and not be too large.
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Phone
Interview Questionniare
The
telephone interviews were designed specifically with qualitative
heuristics in mind, as suggested by Weiss (footnote: Learning
from Strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview
Studies, Robert Stuart Weiss). This design functioned
not only as a guide for neutral, unbiased qualitative
data collection but also as a way to extract some useful
context on the user base itself. By orienting our interviewees
through more general questions that assessed their familiarity
with technology, computers, and the Internet, we were
able to better engage them. We implemented easy-to-answer
questions (as discussed in our tool design above), established
a level of comfort and flow for the rest of the interview,
and then documented some high-level quantitative data
about our interviewees in addition to documenting use
scenarios and extracting themes.
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Phone Interview Coded Results
VA1
VA2
PR1
PR2
PR3
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