Page 38 - IJPS-10-2

International Journal of
Population Studies Design and usability evaluations of a course

2
Figure 4. Test environment: A full-scale model of a one-bedroom apartment (63 m ) equipped with video cameras to enable direct observation by the
researcher.
Table 1. Characteristics of the participants in the second round use, if the course structure was consistent and the course
modules were well integrated). They did not have to read
Characteristics Round 2 (n=6)
anything from home. They were encouraged to open the
Age (years in median) 74 (age range 70 – 79) test kit included in the course material to check the content.
Gender (n) 6 women To guide note-taking, they received a checklist based
Occupation (n) on ten heuristic design principles developed to identify
Retired 5 user problems (Nielsen & Molich, 1990). The principles are
Retired+working as a consultant 1 available at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-
Dwelling type heuristics/(the checklist is shown in Appendix 1. 1). The
Apartment 5 experts were informed that they could move furniture around
House 1 and sit anywhere they wanted to. Self-service coffee or tea
and snacks were available in the kitchen of the apartment.
as a university employee), an email address, and a one-time On the final and third occasion, the experts were
password from the university. They also received instructions informed before the session that they had 1 h to read the
to change the password and activate their user account. remaining course material, after which they were asked
Second, they received a course invitation by email and had to complete the one-page system usability scale (SUS)
to accept it by clicking a button to register. Participants were (Brooke, 1996) for the web-based course and participate
asked to bring their own laptop and smartphone. in an interview. The purpose of obtaining the SUS scores
In the laboratory, before entering the test apartment, the was to supplement the participants’ verbal feedback on
experts were verbally informed about the study and gave how easy it was to use the web-based course and their
their written consent to participate. They were informed overall experience of the course. The SUS quantifies the
that they would be directly observed by the researcher usability of products and services, including software and
with video cameras mounted in the test apartment but not websites, consisting of 10 questions on a 5-point Likert
recorded. The instruction for the task was to read the course scale. SUS scores of individual items were converted to
content on the digital platform using their own laptop for range from 0 to 4 (the higher, the more positive). The
2 h and to pay attention to (i) graphical design, (ii) course sum of the converted values was then multiplied by 2.5,
instructions, (iii) interaction (e.g., if the course was easy to resulting in a total usability score ranging from 0 to 100

Volume 10 Issue 2 (2024) 32 https://doi.org/10.36922/ijps.378