Assignment: evaluate the user experience of some North Carolina's online business forms (updated)

Due: October 24, by class time (date updated) 

In this assignment, you will practice your newfound user experience measurement skills on one of four new online forms that the State of North Carolina is putting together to improve their service to business owners and entrepreneurs. The form you will evaluate is determined by your last name:

• A - F: online business registration form A
• H - Mc: online business registration form B
• Me - R: business license lookup
• S - Z: tax registration form 

For the text registration form, you can get through the process if you choose ‘sole proprietor’ and a 9 digit number that is not a current social security number: e.g. 987654322. Since this process is currently active on their website, the Dept of Revenue just asks that no one press ‘submit’ at the end.

After we have turned in our own portions of this assignment, we will collaborate in class to generate a summary report for each form, and deliver it to our collaborators in North Carolina's government.

Qualitative usability assessment 

Following the procedure summarized in my notes on lightweight measurement and described in more detail in chapter 2 of Kuniavsky's Observing the User Experience, perform a qualitative usability assessment of the form.

Examine your form and design a task that you will use during your evaluation. The task should be typical for the form, while also supporting comprehensive evaluation of it. Each of you will locate four participants. None may be from our class, two must not be students, and one must have business experience.

As your participants work through the form, have them think aloud, and record what they say. When all of them have finished, think about the results and implications of your study.

Expectation measurement 

Have participants rate the difficulty they expect to experience before they use the form, and the difficulty they actually experienced after using the form.

Emotional measurement 

Have participants rate their emotional experience before they use the form, and after. Use the SAM scale, with emotional pictograms, to let them input ratings.

(Update: form) Use this form to input each of your participant's results.