A Textual Feedback Tool for Empowering Participants in Usability and UX Evaluations

ABSTRACT

The usability movement has historically always sought to empower end-users of computers so that they understand what is happening and can control the outcome. In this article, we develop and evaluate a “Textual Feedback” tool for usability and user experience (UX) evaluation that can be used to empower well-educated but low-status users in UX evaluations in countries and contexts with high power distances. The proposed tool contributes to the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) community’s pool of localized UX evaluation tools. We evaluate the tool with 40 users from two socio-economic groups in real-life UX usability evaluations settings in Malaysia. The results indicate that the Textual Feedback tool may help participants to give their thoughts in UX evaluation in high power distance contexts. In particular, the Textual Feedback tool helps high status females and low status males express more UX problems than they can with traditional concurrent think aloud (CTA) alone. We found that classic concurrent think aloud UX evaluation works fine in high power contexts, but only with the addition of Textual Feedback to mitigate the effects of socio-economic status in certain user groups. We suggest that future research on UX evaluation look more into how to empower certain user groups, such as low status female users, in UX evaluations done in high power distance contexts.

Notes

¹ Mi-UXLab 1.0 is a tool developed by the MIMOS Usability/UX Lab at Technology Park Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, as part of the Test in the Cloud strategy, under the Eleventh Malaysia plan (Abolfazli et al., 2015), and of the MIMOS Berhad initiative to establish an environment of an “Information Society acceptable to all citizen” to allow richer communication and collaboration by anyone, anytime anywhere (Stephanidis et al., 1999; Suffian, Fahrurazi, & Ibrahim, 2014).

² Researchers, who are interested, can write to the first author, to request for a trial use. At the time of publishing this article, the tool was hosted on https://usability.mimos.my/mi-uxlab/home.php

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ashok Sivaji

Ashok Sivaji is pursuing a PhD at the National University of Malaysia. He currently works as a Senior Staff Engineer at MIMOS Technology Solutions (MIMOS Berhad) as the Usability/UX Lab Lead. He is interested in cultural usability/UX testing, other areas evaluation methodologies, cloud testing and automation.

Søren Feodor Nielsen

Søren Feodor Nielsen is a professor of statistics and the director of the Center for Statistics at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His main research interest is in developing models, methods and theory suitable for incomplete data problems but he has also contributed to nonparametric statistics and econometrics.

Torkil Clemmensen

Torkil Clemmensen is a professor with special duties in Human–Computer Interaction at the Department of IT Management, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His interest is in psychology as a science of design, including human work interaction design.