手机产品开发早期阶段用户界面评估方法

Methodology for Evaluating Product Design at the Early Stage of Life Cycle

在产品开发早期阶段对产品原型进行有效的可用性评估是终端用户需求能够得以满足的重要保障。为此,以手机产品为例提出了一种结合了用户测试和问卷测量的可用性评估方法,并以手机产品的纸面原型为对象进行了实验研究。研究者选择了3款具有代表性手机作为实验的评估对象,并制作相应的纸面原型。实验中,72名参与者分别在原型和产品的用户界面上完成7个任务,然后通过填写问卷的方式对被测界面的可用性给出评价。通过分析比较真实产品和纸面原型的评估结果,验证了这一方法的有效性。结果表明,本文方法能够发现足够的可用性问题的数量和类型,说明此方法是可行的,并且对于指示界面上存在的可用性问题具有较高的敏感度。

Effectively evaluating the product prototypes in the early stage of a product development life cycle is critical to the success of product design. To achieve the goal, this study aims to develop a methodology that incorporated with user testing and questionnaire measures to evaluate the usability of paper prototypes of mobile phones. Three typical types of mobile phones are chosen. A series of paper prototypes are developed according to the interfaces of the actual products. Then a total of 72 participants are asked to perform regular tasks using the products or the prototypes. After finishing the tasks, they give their evaluations to the tested system by answering a 43-item Likert-scale questionnaire, which comprises of 13 usability dimensions that particularly measure the usability of mobile phones. The score for each dimension is calculated. The score of actual products and paper prototypes are compared. The results show that the method proposed in this study can detect similar number and types of usability problems from the paper prototypes compared with the actual products, suggesting it is a feasible and sensitive methodology to quantitatively evaluate the prototype usability with novices in the early stage of a product development life cycle.