Pen Tablet UI/User Study

This page describes a user study that was performed on April 8 and 10, 2008 by Patrick Dubroy in order to evaluate prototypes for a Pen Tablet UI.

Method

Participants

Five participants were selected for the study. No participant was familiar with the XO hardware or the Sugar UI, nor did they have any experience with a conventional graphics tablet. [More details to come]

The number of participants was chosen based on Jakob Neilsen's rationale (Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users) that this will find approximately 85% of the usability problems in a design. Given the early design stage, this seems like an appropriate approach.

Study method

Partipants were asked to perform a several drawing tasks using the Think Aloud protocol. Before beginning the tasks, participants were given an opportunity to become familiar with the OLPC and get a feel for the use of the tablet. This warm-up period was also used to get the participants comfortable with using think-aloud.

During the drawing tasks, video of the screen and tablet area was captured along with audio. Afterwards, I reviewed the videos and made notes of any interesting results, behaviours, or comments.

Results

Detailed notes from each participant:

• C
• S
• M
• A
• MO