A Hybrid Approach in the Evaluation of Usability for Multimedia Objects: Case Study of the Media Assets Management Platform for an Advertainment Production Project toward Beijing Olympics 2008

Abstract

Many studies done in the study of usability and heuristic evaluations have evolved around the use of scenarios and heuristics. In our study, we aim to define usability attributes using research on scenariobased design methodologies as well as classical heuristic evaluation theories -specifically for hypermedia objects. We then apply these principles on a digital portal developed for use in a video production project for Beijing Olympics 2008, evaluating it for usability using the developed approach, with an aim to also initiate an iterative usability design process for the project.

Scenario-Based Methods for Evaluating Collaborative Systems

“…Scenario-based approaches have since been applied to the design of information systems, where they bridge the gulf between the abstractness of engineering rules and the inescapable situatedness of work (Carroll 2000;Carroll and Rosson 1992). They have been shown to be effective in a variety of applications including: human-computer interaction (Carroll 1995;Carroll et al 1993;Clements et al 2001), expert evaluation (Mukkamalla et al 2002), discount usability evaluation (Blandford 2002;Blanford and Rugg 2002;Nielsen 1995), diary studies (Nielsen 1995), visualization (Winckler et al 2004), software architecture evaluation (De Bruin and Van Vliet 2001;Ionita et al 2002;Pang et al 2005), evaluation of a document access control system (Stiemerling and Cremers 1998), comparison of specific behaviors of configuration management systems (Ge and Whitehead 2006), as well as training following from evaluation (Bernstein and Vorburger 2006). One study used scenarios in controlled settings for evaluating specific collaborative system features (Damianos et al 2000;Damianos et al 1999).…”