Inspection based evaluations

Usability inspection methods (UIMs) remain an important discount method for usability evaluation. They can be applied to any designed artefact during development: a paper prototype, a storyboard, a working prototype (e.g., in Macromedia Flash™ or in Microsoft PowerPoint™), tested production software, or an installed public release. They are analytical evaluation methods, which involve no typical end users, unlike empirical methods such as user testing. UIMs only require availability of a designed artefact and trained analysts. Thus, evaluation is possible with low resources (hence discount methods). Although risks arise from low resources, well-informed practices disproportionately improve analyst performance, improving cost-benefit ratios. This chapter introduces UIMs, covering six and one further method, and provides approaches to assessing existing, emerging and future UIMs and their effective uses

Falsification testing for usability inspection method assessment

We need more reliable usability inspection methods (UIMs), but assessment of UIMs has been unreliable [5]. We can only reliably improve UIMs if we have more reliable assessment. When assessing UIMs, we need to code analysts’ predictions as true or false positives or negatives, or as genuinely missed problems. Defenders of UIMs often claim that false positives cannot be accurately coded, i.e., that a prediction is true but has never shown up through user testing or other validation approaches. We show this and similar claims to be mistaken by briefly reviewing methods for reliable coding of each of five types of prediction outcome. We focus on falsification testing, which allows confident coding of false positives

\u3ci\u3eRussian hosts and English guests in Central Asia\u3c/i\u3e

A journey made in November and December (1897) over the Transcaspian Military Railway in Russian Central Asia. Until quite recently the very greatest difficulties were placed in the way of any foreigner who tried to penetrate the region which is bordered roughly on the west by the Caspian, on the north by Khiva and the Turkestan Desert, on the east by the great mountain walls of Afghanistan, Turkestan, and India, and on the south by Persia and Afghanistan. The Book is the author\u27s descriptions of travels made to these regions