Uma comparação entre técnicas de redesign de interface baseadas em especialistas e baseadas em usuários

Abstract

Usability is one of the most important qualities in an application. A software product with usability issues is likely to foster frustrating experiences and possibly to fall into disuse. An alternative for products with usability problems is the redesign, a process that involves redraw the application to fix the issues. There are different techniques to evaluate the usability and redraw an application. These techniques involve different people and they have different associated costs, being divided into techniques based on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) experts and techniques based on non-experts. In this context, this work aims to perform a comparison between the different aforementioned approaches, i.e., it aims to compare and verify whether there is any significant difference between using experts and non-experts in the evaluation and redesign process of an application. In order to do this, cognitive walkthrough and user testing techniques were chosen to represent evaluation techniques using experts and non-experts, respectively. For the redesign process, low fidelity prototyping was separately applied by both experts and non-experts based on reports of the previous evaluation. The application used in all stages of this work was a mobile app made available by DevPampa software company. As the main contribuition of this study, it was identified that based on measurements made during evaluation and redesign phases there are no statistical differences between both approaches.