Chapter Introduction | Web Resources | Assignment Comments | Teaching Materials

- Resources for asking users
- Resources for asking experts

Asking users: Questionnaires and Interviews

Web-Based User Interface Evaluation with Questionnaires
This is one of the best sites for learning about questionnaires. In addition to descriptions and good references the site also contains templates for you to try out or to build your own questionnaires. The results can be mailed either to yourself or someone else. The questionnaire templates provide questions with Likert or Semantic scales. There are also fields for open-ended text comments. Clicking on a small icon next to each Likert scale question causes a open-ended comment area are to be produced.

http://www.lap.umd.edu/quis
These questionnaires, developed at the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, have been used for many years and have recently been made available on the web. They are tried and tested but unfortunately there is a licensing fee for use, although this fee is reduced for students.

http://www.otal.umd.edu/hci-rm/survey.html
This site provides a brief introduction to questionnaire design and doing interviews. There is also a brief case study and links to other useful sites.

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~stats/survey-soft/survey-soft.html
This site provides many useful links to survey software analysis tools.

http://hfrg.ucc.ie/resources/qfaq1.html
This site offers a list of important questions about questionnaire design in usability testing and usability engineering. For example, Dr. Jurek Kirakowski asks: what is a questionnaire; how do you analyze open-ended questionnaires; how can I tell if a question should use a Likert scale or not; can you tell if a respondent is lying; and many other interesting and important questions.

http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/survey-1998-10
These are two examples of national surveys that you may wish to examine. They contain results of annual surveys of internet usage. One problem with this survey is that is uses convenience sampling which is not scientific. By sending the survey to as many Internet users as possible these researchers are trying to obtain as random a sample as possible.

http://www.pewinternet.org
The Pew Internet and American Life survey reports regularly on different aspects related to this topic. As well as providing interesting content it is useful to examine the survey design.

- Asking Experts

http://usableweb.com
This site contains links to sites that deal specifically with heuristic evaluation for the web. For example, http://usableweb.com/topics/000606-0-0.html offers useful guidance on how to apply Nielsen's heuristics to website evaluation.

http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic
Not surprisingly Jakob Nielsen's site has a large section on heuristic evaluation, including his own papers, 'how to' information and a list of references to studies that compare the efficacy of heuristic evaluation with other evaluation methods; particularly user testing and walkthroughs.

http://www.otal.umd.edu/hci-rm/survey.html
This site provides a brief introduction to questionnaire design and doing interviews. There is also a brief case study and links to other useful sites.