Ipl Limitations of Study

Limitations of Study

The best option of discovering the most usability problems of a website is through merging several information gathering methods. Personas are only good as the research put into them and scenarios are not meant to discover a full set of requirements (Sharp, Rogers, Preece, 2007, p.506). According to The Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines Book, the first chapter states that a successful project needs at least four different sources of information to be successful (Bailey, Koyani, Nall, 2004)

Due to the short time span of our project, we were not able to evaluate the entire website and as a result our team only evaluated a small sample of information within the five main sections. With five members on our team Neilsen (1992) found that evaluators discover about 75% of the total usability problems. Our team used heuristic evaluation as the sole inspection method which could at times be a disadvantage to fully depend on. Heuristic evaluations may not scale well for complex interfaces (Slakovic & Cross, 1999). Since our team consisted of only five members, a small number of evaluators may not find most of the problems in complex interfaces, like ipl2.org, and may miss some serious problems. Also the heuristic evaluation limited each team member to only emulate the users. Actual user feedback can only be obtained by involving potential users in the heuristic evaluation. Lastly heuristic heuristic evaluations may be prone to reporting false alarms - problems that are reported that are not actual usability problems in application (Jefferies et al, 1994). Consequently these problems may not always readily suggest solutions for usability issues that are identified. To reduce the possibility of missing a major problem, our group focused on the common problems we found on the ipl2 site through each team member’s heuristic evaluation worksheet.

Koyani, S., Bailey, R., Nall, J. (2004) Research-Based Web Design & Usability...