Affect of Context on Think-aloud During Usability Evaluation

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of physical context on the outcomes of usability evaluation when think- aloud usability testing protocol is applied on children. Usability evaluation is performed with 18 children by assigning them randomly to two different physical settings: a lab and a field. Traditional think–aloud protocol is applied to elicit verbal comments from the children while solving tasks on the given system. The amount of verbalization, impact of test monitor on solving tasks, amount of prompting by the test monitor is quantitatively measured during the test sessions. The results indicates that context plays important role in influencing the results of usability evaluation and that think- aloud when applied in different physical contexts gives different results.

Keywords: Think-aloud, physical context, usability evaluation, child computer interaction, ICDL, verbalisation