文章基本信息

标题：ON THE USABILITY OF SOCIAL SOFTWARE SYSTEMS: A PRELIMINARY STUDY USING ELGG
本地全文：下载
作者：Lenandlar Singh
期刊名称：Education Sciences and Psychology
印刷版ISSN：1512-1801
电子版ISSN：1512-1801
出版年度：2009
卷号：15
期号：2
页码：63-81
出版社：Georgia Internet Academy
摘要：This paper reports on a Usability Evaluation conducted on a deployment of the Social Software Elgg at the University of Brighton: Community@Brighton available at http://community.brighton.ac.uk. Community@Brighton is a social software system installed at the University of Brighton to provide a forum for social interactions among students and staff at the University of Brighton. Community@Brighton is an instance of the social software Elgg with the present deployment using Elgg Version 0.7. A usability test was conducted on the use of the features and functionalities of the system. Five (5) lecturers from the School of Computing, Mathematical and Information Sciences at the University of Brighton participated in this study. Each participant performed a number of browsing based and hands-on tasks using the system. The design of the study was centered on the use of the usability testing methodology together with the think aloud technique for usability evaluation. There were four (4) dependent variables: task completion rates, number of defects, number of assists and problem counts or number of errors per task. A subjective questionnaire was also administered at the end to obtain qualitative exploratory data about users’ satisfaction with the system. A total of 90 defects were identified from the evaluation of which 13 were identified on the Homepage of the system, 39 from browsing based activities and 38 from hands-on tasks. The problems were placed into one of four (4) categories namely navigation – 19 defects, Labeling -20 defects, general heuristic – 21 defects and functionality – 30 defects.