MEDIUM

Usability evaluation

CLIENT

TMN, 2004

MY ROLE

Usability Analist

Client documentation

TMN asked me to compare three mobile web portals from a user experience perspective and propose a list of recommendations towards the future work of the company in this area.

The portals analysed were: i9 (TMN), Live! (Vodafone) and Zone (Optimus) performing through UMTS and GPRS networks.

The analyse was developed in three phases: a heuristic evaluation, a performance-based analysis (with think aloud protocol) and informal user's opinion questionnaires.

The list of heuristics was developed in order to fit the specificities of the mobile context, devices physicality and network technology. A list of 148 heuristics, grouped in 11 categories, was applied to the experience of the three portals and classified by Gravity, Severity, Impact and Persistence.

After this, a pre-set of tasks was tested by final-users. A group of 6 people (25-35 years-old) with previous experience in mobile phone and (fixed) Internet use was selected.

Users were asked to perform 4 tasks in each of the portals and to describe in louder voice their expectations and thoughts. All the sessions were video recorded for post analysis (time to conclude a task, number of steps to achieve it, level of success, number of errors, recovering time, type of error, gravity of the error).

At the end, an informal interview was made in order to gather the users' opinion about their experience, identify problems and make suggestions.

This study was developed as the final thesis project on a post-graduate specialization in Ergonomics in Information Design at the Technical University of Lisbon thanks to the infrastructure support of TMN, the leading mobile operator in Portugal.