Constructive interaction provides natural thinking-aloud as test subjects collaborate in pairs to solve tasks. Since children may face difficulties in following instructions for a standard think-aloud test, constructive interaction has been suggested as evaluation method when usability testing with children. However, the relationship between think-aloud and constructive interaction is still poo...

I will talk here about three problems that have bothered me for a number of years, during which time I have experimented with a variety of solutions and encouraged others to work on them. I have raised each of them separately both in full and in passing in various contexts, but thought it would be worthwhile on this occasion to bring them to your attention side by side. In this talk I will expl...

We report an experiment which seeks to determine how novice users’ conceptual understanding of graphs differs depending on the nature of the interaction with them. Undergraduate psychology students were asked to interpret three-variable “interaction” data in either bar or line graph form and were required to either think aloud while doing so or to produce written interpretations. Analysis of th...

g in usability research onal usability testing. There are various methodologies available when conducting research using eye trackers. This paper presents the results of a study aimed to compare the outcomes from four different retrospective think aloud (RTA) methods in a web usability study: an un‐cued RTA, a video cued RTA, a gaze plot cued RTA, and a gaze video cued RTA. Results indicate tha...

A resurgence of interest in qualitative approaches to research in online consumer behaviour studies has spawned a need for structured approaches in the use of appropriate research techniques. A mixed method approach to research questions can often lead to a greater clarity of answer as well as exposing the researcher to new ‘tools of enquiry’. This paper describes a mixed method approach using ...

Think aloud protocols are widely applied in user experience studies. In this paper, the effect of two different applications of the Retrospective Think Aloud (RTA) protocol on the number of user-reported usability issues is examined. To this end, 30 users were asked to use the National Cadastre and Mapping Agency web application and complete a set of tasks, such as measuring the land area of a ...

This paper describes a comparative study of three usability test approaches: concurrent thinkaloud protocols, retrospective think-aloud protocols, and constructive interaction. These three methods were compared by means of an evaluation of an online library catalogue, which involved four points of comparison: number and type of usability problems detected; relevance of the problems detected; ov...

Think-aloud protocols are a dominant method in usability testing. There is, however, only little empirical evidence on the actual validity of the method. This paper describes an experiment that compares concurrent and retrospective think-aloud protocols for a usability test of an online library catalogue. There were three points of comparison: usability problems detected, overall task performan...

While AMN-3 clearly had other impacts on me, the conference had major benefi ts in terms of advancing one particular area of my research. I was extraordinarily fortunate to have in the audience during the talk I was giving focused on the work of Conrad Lendrum, one of my past PhD students, Michael Toney. Mike hails from SSRL (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory), which is part of SLAC (St...

Welcome to the latest issue of Publications, a journal for studies and opinion on all aspects of scholarly publishing and communication. A specific welcome from me too, as the new Editor-in-Chief. Our journal is fully “peer reviewed” or “refereed”. These expressions are synonymous although, despite modest research, I’ve not discovered the origin of the word “referee” in this context—if any of y...