Introduction
I now have five resources from the databases and two books I read in previous courses to reference whilst designing my research. This post will look to document my efforts in finding more and illustrate the use of Boolean operators while using the databases. This will ensure I have less than 200 results to choose from.
Usability Test & Digital Interface
This search will utilize a Boolean that ensures my results pertain to usability test and digital interfaces. I also narrow down nearly all my searches to only receive full text articles and show research done within the last dozen years. Unless, of course, historical research is valuable within the context. I will be utilizing Gale OneFile’s Computer Science service section. Giving these limitations and typing in ‘Usability Test & Digital Interfaces’ gave me 18 results. I selected to look into one article titled ‘Removing Barriers to Promote Social Computing Among Senior Population.’ (Marcelino et al., 2015) This provided a great outlook on how usability testing can be used to improve a larger concept. The actual usability testing is only a small part of this piece. The article discusses the potential benefits of educating seniors on technology use which included things like virtual health monitoring. Particularly helpful is the list of follow-up questions they presented the users with after showing the seniors the interface they were testing.
Heuristic Evaluation NOT Mobile
For my next search I wanted to obtain evaluations that did not include mobile interfaces on phones in order to focus more on workplace types of software. I utilized Gale Onefile again and typed in ‘ heuristic evaluation not mobile’ using the advanced search tab once again. Additionally, I used the full documents checkbox and specified a date range again as well. This gave me 58 results from Academic journals and 1 magazine article. Additionally, 101 news medial results came up but I did not spend much time looking at them. The next article I found is titled ‘Developers as Users: Exploring the Experiences of Using a New Theoretical Method for Usability Assessment.’ (Bligård et al., 2017). This study is done with an interesting twist and used other developers, heuristic experts and students were used to test two theoretical methods for conducting usability test. These methods are significant changes from established usability standards and overall introduce quantitative methods to what is usually a qualitative focused type of research. These methods may be beyond the scope of the experiment I am designing but I would like to try and implement at least one of the methods they implement within my own efforts. Overall, this is a great display of mixed-method research design.
References
Bligård, L.-O., Strömberg, H., & Karlsson, M. A. (2017). Developers as Users: Exploring the Experiences of Using a New Theoretical Method for Usability Assessment. Advances in Human-Computer Interaction, 2017, 1–13. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.fhsu.edu:2048/10.1155/2017/6131575
Looks like you are getting valuable information to use with your proposal. I had some difficulty getting the numbers that were asked for in this week’s requirements and had to use a bunch of add on words to get to the right numbers. A few of the databases tend to break when you use too many keywords so I had to move on to others. Did you have any issues getting the numbers of returns that she was asking for?
Hi Benjamin,
Sounds like you’ve got a really good set of research to use for your experiment. I thought you did a great job with your keywords and using the checkboxes to narrow your results to exactly what you needed. I think it’s a great idea to look into educating seniors on technology use. I imagine they’re more overlooked compared to younger users when it comes to usability. Also, good for you for going above an beyond with the results from your Heuristic Evaluation NOT Mobile search and trying to implement one of their quantitative methods!