JOENSUUN YLIOPISTO										EXERCISES 2
Tietojenkäsittelytieteen laitos	              			Week 12
Usability Engineering / Käytettävyystekniikat	



4: X task

 In the following weeks we will be developing a hypothetical product. As good usability professionals we focus early on users. Therefore, we start with developing the User Profiles questionnaire, similar to the one you have got during the lectures.
 You can choose between two applications. Once selected, you will be following certain parts of Usability engineering life-cycle for that application. Therefore, consider your selection well.
 
 Application 1: WWW site of the Department of Computer Science, University of Usability, UE. You can restrict your task to three-five primary user categories.
 
 Application 2: A program/algorithm visualization tool for introductory programming courses. While the main function of the tool is to visualize a program, consider only some of the additional modes of interaction: e.g. editing code, debugging, comprehension, asking questions, collaborative programming, knowledge assessment, interacting with visualization, etc. 

 Task:
 a. Why have you chosen this application?
 b. Design a User Profile questionnaire for your application. Use about 10 questions.
 c. Using two to five peers from the UE2006 class, conduct the data collection. Discuss with them, whether they consider the characteristics you chose as important. Summarize and briefly report the results.
 
 In order to complete the exercise, you have to email your answers by midnight before the demos to Minna Kamppuri (firstname.lastname@cs.joensuu.fi).


5: 

 What could be the effects of not including User Profiling into the Usability Engineering life-cycle?


6:

 Contextual Task Analysis tries to observe what are the current practices and working models of users in their normal environment. Imagine that your product's goal is to replace filling a paper form and then transcribing that information into a database by an online version. This can happen for instance when reporting an insurance case, booking a hotel by phone, ordering a meal, etc.
 
 a. If the original paper form were designed poorly, what could be an implication of not conducting CTA at all?
 b. Would an interview with/observation of a current user outside their working environment yield different results than conducting it and an observation on-site? If yes, what the difference could be?
  
 You can check additional material related to this task: http://cs.joensuu.fi/pages/intra/bednarik/UE2006/d2/
 
 
7:
 
 How on earth can simple things be so difficult? What is your experience with printing out from computer?