A Cost-Effective Usability Evaluation Progression for Novel Interactive Systems

Abstract

This paper reports on user interface design and evaluation for a mobile, outdoor, augmented reality (AR) application. This novel system, called the Battlefield Augmented Reality System (BARS), supports information presentation and entry for situation awareness in an urban war fighting setting. To our knowledge, this is the first time extensive use of usability engineering has been systematically applied to development of a real-world AR system. Our BARS team has applied a cost-effective progression of usability engineering activities from the very beginning of BARS development. We discuss how we first applied cycles of structured expert evaluations to BARS user interface development, employing user interface mockups representing occluded (non-visible) objects. Then we discuss how results of these evaluations informed our subsequent user-based statistical evaluations and formative evaluations, and present these evaluations and their outcomes. Finally, we discuss how and why this sequence of types of evaluation is cost-effective.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2004
Accession Number
ADA507999

Entities

People

  • Deborah Hix
  • Dennis Brown
  • J. E. Swan Ii
  • Joseph L. Gabbard
  • Mark A. Livingston
  • Simon J. Julier
  • Tobias H. Hoellerer
  • Yohan Baillot

Organizations

  • Virginia Tech

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application Software
  • Augmented Reality
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Computer Graphics
  • Computers
  • Engineering
  • Engineers
  • Graphics
  • Human Systems Integration
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Military Operations
  • Military Research
  • Software Development
  • Systems Engineering
  • User Interface
  • User Interface Engineering
  • Virtual Reality

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).
  • Instructional Design and Training Evaluation.
  • Software Engineering.