CPSC 481: Foundations of HCI

James Tam

 

Windows Media Player

 

 

Your situation

 

Your group is a team of usability experts who are employed by the Ace Consulting Company (™)  in order to evaluate the usability of the Windows Media Player © Microsoft version 10.  In order to ensure consistency between projects it is important that you all run your tests with this version of this program.  You have been assigned by the VP of your company to determine if the Media Player meets the needs of the people who currently use the system.  In addition, your VP may be interested in seeing how quickly new users pick up on the functions. Your job is to study the program and find any problems that may arise when people are using the system caused by flaws in the design of the interface.  This will be done by observing people who are using the program while carrying out a set of pre-created tasks and then recommending ways in which these flaws may be corrected.   Try to get as wide a mix of test participants within this range as possible such as:

It is up to your team of consultants to come with a set of typical tasks that should be completed by the test users.  Although I have started all the groups off by providing a list of sample tasks each group must add to this list.  The assignment sheet has a section that indicates how you can go about this and should already be familiar with task descriptions from Assignment 1.  As well, the experimenter should try the system ahead of time, becoming as familiar with it as possible.  Your group should come up with a total of five tasks (which may include the three tasks that I have provided below) to give to your test participants; preferably, you should come up with even more.  A good task one that is likely to be used by many end-users. Tasks should also be selected to investigate different (but still important or heavily used) parts of the system's features.

Here is a list of some sample tasks to start you all out.  Feel free to use them in your study but again make sure that you write up some additional tasks of your own:

Sample tasks:

Note: Because of security restrictions on the computers in the PC labs you may have trouble completing certain tasks because the features have been altered or disabled.  Make sure you don't create tasks that cannot be completed solely because of a setting in Windows.  Your test participants should be evaluating the usability of the Media Player's interface not the security settings of Windows.

Task 1.  Playing music on the Media Player.  You heard from a friend that there is an audio/video player built into Windows called the "Windows Media Player".   It lets you play videos across the Internet, listen to downloaded music and it will even play your music CD's.  Your are to run the Media player and have it play your favorite song.  [JT: If you choose to use this task then you will have to make sure that the person's computer is properly set up ahead of time.  Depending upon the test participant you may want to have the person keep their CD handy or ask him or her to play an audio file off their hard drive.]

Reason for choosing this task:  This task is frequently completed by users of this system and it is crucial that the system can support it.  All the extra features are useless if users can't complete this task.

Task 2.  Browsing for that elusive tune.   Somehow, sometime during the day a you started hearing a song fragment in your head from the Silent Hill 3 © Konami sound track and it just wouldn't stop:

So now what should I do, I'm strung out, addicted to you ♫
My body aches, now that you're gone ♫
My supply fell through ♫

Search the CD (already inserted in the drive) and browse it with MediaPlayer in order find that elusive song.  [JT: You may have to modify the particulars of this task in order to fit particular test participants so you may not want to have all people try this task].

Reason for choosing this task:   Although this task may not be as common as the previous one people do frequently want to browse through a set of songs in order to find a specific selection rather than listening to everything from start to finish.  Or they may repeatedly listen to only a few parts of the CD while skipping other parts.  Consequently the system should support this in a simple and straight-forward fashion.

Task 3: Creating a collection of your favorite music.  Your 10 favorite songs [JT: if you are on lab computer you will have to set things up ahead of time and give the person a list of titles, if you are on the person's home computer then you can have the person use their own collection] are scattered throughout your computer and CD collection.  Since you are tired having to look for them every time you want to listen to this set of music you decide to collect them together in a play list.

Reason for choosing this task.  This is an infrequent task but it is important that the system supports it because it is one of the advantages of using the Media Player rather than using more traditional mechanism like a stereo.

Preparing Equipment

Test participants can either run the Media Player from their own computer or you can run it from your own account (again watch for features that are disabled on the computers in the lab).   Since many of the tasks work better if you use audio files and CD's that the person actually listens to, the first case is preferred.

Parts of the system to exclude from your the usability study