Fabian Körner - User Centred Design
Figure: Participants in the Co-Discovery usability tests.
MythTV Digital Video Recorder
Co-Discovery testing of an on-screen interface
For this two-week project my team and I evaluated the on-screen interface of an OpenSource digital video recorder (mythTV). The project's goal was to find the products most severe usability problems.
Actions and results
In the project kick-off meeting we selected the testing method – Co-Discovery testing. In a next step, we worked out a test plan for the specific goals and designed scenarios, tasks and testing material. Concurrently, we invited five pairs of “naïve” users to our usability lab. During the test sessions we recorded the participants' facial expressions on video for later analysis. Afterwards, the video material and verbal data were annotated and analysed with Noldus Observer.
As a result, we were able to present a list of the most severe problems of the mythTV user interface, e.g. inefficient list navigation, ambiguous button labels etc.
This project accompanied the module „Usability Testing“ of the User-System Interaction post-graduate program at the TU Eindhoven.
