Usability Report and Assessment
For this assignment, you will choose a PRODUCT, SERVICE, WEBSITE, or PROGRAM relevant to your field of study / major. After carefully using and studying the text you’ve chosen, you will write a USABILITY REPORT and an ASSESSMENT detailing what your user experience was like, what were the positives and negatives, and how you would, as a professional, recommend modifying or redoing the text. These reports will be FORMAL and will follow the formatting and style guidelines provided in the samples and detailed assignment sheets which will be posted to D2L. You will be putting together a two-part report that covers the following:
Part 1: Usability Report
What is the text? What medium is it published in? What is its stated purpose and goal? Summarize the text’s content, structure, and overall purpose (and how it seeks to accomplish this).
Who is the intended audience of the text? What discourse community? What field of study or business? What is their level of expertise or knowledge about the topic of the text? What knowledge and skills are they assumed to have? What does the text attempt to teach them? What are they expected to do once they have completed reading/using the text?
What was the user experience like? How effectively designed was the text? Was it easy to use? Were you able to find the relevant information easily? If you had to put down the text for a time, could you easily find your place again? Was the relevant information clear and easy to access? Were you able to easily use all of the features? Did the text make accomplishing the stated goals easier or more complicated? Would you recommend using this text?
What level of input was the audience expected to contribute? Are they passive users? Active participants? Co-designers? What motivates them to participate? Is it intrinsic (doing something for its own sake) or extrinsic (doing something for a reward)?
Did the text make effective use of the medium? Did it do things with the technology/accessibility that it could not have easily done in other mediums? Would you recommend a different medium? Why or why not?
Part 2: Assessment
What were the procedures you followed for using the text/product? Were these formally instructed, or were you simply intuiting them? Was there a specific order of operations? How much deviation was possible?
How did the text/product seek to accomplish its goals? What level of input did you have as a user/reader? What elements of the text made this goal easier to achieve? Which made it more difficult?
What technical flaws did you find in the text? Broken links? Improper or unhelpful images/media? Unclear instructions? Confusing grammar? How did these flaws hinder your user experience? How might they be fixed?
How easily might this text be modified or corrected? Is it designed for a single publication or is it iterative? Can the user make corrections or is only the developer able to do so? Does this work well for it?
Overall, how successful was the text? How would you improve upon it? If it needs to be remade or done differently what resources would be required and how should they be used? What are your recommendations for the author or designers going forward?
In total, this report will be 3-5 pages and will follow the formatting guidelines in the readings/handouts. You may also include screenshots, video, or audio reports if you would prefer a multimodal report.
For this assignment, you will choose a PRODUCT, SERVICE, WEBSITE, or PROGRAM relevant to your field of study / major. After carefully using and studying the text you’ve chosen, you will write a USABILITY REPORT and an ASSESSMENT detailing what your user experience was like, what were the positives and negatives, and how you would, as a professional, recommend modifying or redoing the text. These reports will be FORMAL and will follow the formatting and style guidelines provided in the samples and detailed assignment sheets which will be posted to D2L. You will be putting together a two-part report that covers the following:
Part 1: Usability Report
What is the text? What medium is it published in? What is its stated purpose and goal? Summarize the text’s content, structure, and overall purpose (and how it seeks to accomplish this).
Who is the intended audience of the text? What discourse community? What field of study or business? What is their level of expertise or knowledge about the topic of the text? What knowledge and skills are they assumed to have? What does the text attempt to teach them? What are they expected to do once they have completed reading/using the text?
What was the user experience like? How effectively designed was the text? Was it easy to use? Were you able to find the relevant information easily? If you had to put down the text for a time, could you easily find your place again? Was the relevant information clear and easy to access? Were you able to easily use all of the features? Did the text make accomplishing the stated goals easier or more complicated? Would you recommend using this text?
What level of input was the audience expected to contribute? Are they passive users? Active participants? Co-designers? What motivates them to participate? Is it intrinsic (doing something for its own sake) or extrinsic (doing something for a reward)?
Did the text make effective use of the medium? Did it do things with the technology/accessibility that it could not have easily done in other mediums? Would you recommend a different medium? Why or why not?
Part 2: Assessment
What were the procedures you followed for using the text/product? Were these formally instructed, or were you simply intuiting them? Was there a specific order of operations? How much deviation was possible?
How did the text/product seek to accomplish its goals? What level of input did you have as a user/reader? What elements of the text made this goal easier to achieve? Which made it more difficult?
What technical flaws did you find in the text? Broken links? Improper or unhelpful images/media? Unclear instructions? Confusing grammar? How did these flaws hinder your user experience? How might they be fixed?
How easily might this text be modified or corrected? Is it designed for a single publication or is it iterative? Can the user make corrections or is only the developer able to do so? Does this work well for it?
Overall, how successful was the text? How would you improve upon it? If it needs to be remade or done differently what resources would be required and how should they be used? What are your recommendations for the author or designers going forward?
In total, this report will be 3-5 pages and will follow the formatting guidelines in the readings/handouts. You may also include screenshots, video, or audio reports if you would prefer a multimodal report.
