Bill Albert and Jim Lewis
Journal of Usability Studies–Co-Editors in Chief
Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 11, Issue 3, May, 2016
For our May issue, Professor Morten Hertzum has contributed an editorial on “Usability Testing: Too Early? Too Much Talking? Too Many Problems?” In his editorial Professor Hertzum takes a look at current practices in usability testing. He argues for the value of testing late in the development process, being wary of thinking aloud, and focusing on effects rather than problems.
The first article is “Re-assessing the Usability Metric for User Experience (UMUX) Scale,” by Mr. Mehmet Ilker Berkman and Dr. Dilek Karahoca. The UMUX is a relatively new standardized usability questionnaire, but one that has generated significant interest among practitioners and researchers since its introduction in 2010. The research reported by Mr. Berkman and Dr. Karahoca contributes to the growing body of knowledge for this questionnaire, both the original four-item version and the two-item UMUX-LITE, with investigation of its psychometric properties, focusing on reliability, construct validity, sensitivity, and relationship to the System Usability Scale (SUS).
The second article is by Dr. Young Mi Choi and Mr. Jingtian Li on “Usability Evaluation of a New Text Input Method for Smart TVs.” In this article the authors developed and evaluated a new approach to smart TV text entry that combines a touch pad and virtual keyboard interaction. They tested four different input methods: a simple remote control, a touch pad, a physical keyboard, and a prototype of the new text entry method. The results indicated that the new method was more effective than the remote and touch pad, and was comparable to the physical keyboard.
