Abstract
Interactive domestic facilities provide diverse services nowadays and make human-computer interface issues more complex. Whether the interactive systems adapt target users therefore is very important. To achieve the goal of bettering users’ experiences, effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction are three principal considerations. The aim of this paper is to propose a structured methodology for implementing usability evaluation which takes into consideration of the principles just mentioned. There are three steps in the process. Domain experts and target users were first recruited to collaboratively establish the context of usability, and followed by choosing proper usability indices to evaluate the interactive systems. Recommendations for improving current product/prototype can be drawn from the analysis results lastly. Interactive TV (iTV) was chosen as a case in this current study to prove the proposed methodology is feasible. Results showed that the most important issue for current iTV design was navigation menu, which included classifying/naming the folder properly and providing intuitive cues during operation. By this we proved that the proposed methodology does have the ability to detect possible area for improvement and at the meanwhile the results can be more robust because of the usability indices measurements.