The Impact of the Combination between Task Designs and Think-Aloud Approaches on Website Evaluation

Abstract

The growth of the Internet and related technologies has enabled the development of a new breed of dynamic website and applications that are growing rapidly in use, which have had a significant impact on many businesses. Usability testing is a method widely used for measuring the usability of a system from the perspective of real users. The main aim of this paper is to explore the efficiency of three types of usability testing method by discovering usability problems through a combination of three proposed task designs and three types of 'think-aloud' approach, and to compare the results of these methods with those of the traditional usability testing method that has been published separately. This is a missing area in usability testing. The quantitative and qualitative data are collected and analysed in order to assess the efficiency of the three combinations in terms of the usability problems encountered and their severity, and the success rate and user satisfaction of the websites being tested, through the feedback received. The research findings show clearly that the task scenarios and how they are designed and combined with different types of 'think-aloud' approaches can influence the usability testing results by discovering different types of usability problems, and can affect the results of usability measures, such as success rate, errors number and time spent.

How many participants are really enough for usability studies?

“…We arrived at these results through using differing combinations of task designs and think-aloud approaches, which increased the complexity of these experiments [30] [31]. Therefore, we should rethink Nielsen"s argument when he argues in favour of increasing the sample size only to test complex systems.…”