Study of the Usability of the WYRED Ecosystem Using Heuristic Evaluation

Abstract

The WYRED ecosystem is a composition of Open Source tools and the people involved in the project, i.e., partners, stakeholders and young people between the ages of 7 and 30 years. The main component of this ecosystem is the WYRED Platform. The WYRED Platform relies on communities, which are a set of interaction spaces where conversations and research projects are developed. Every community has a person or persons in charge of its management, which are the so-called facilitators, and also a set of members, mainly young people, interacting through discussion threads. The high levels of interaction required to accomplish the WYRED Platform’s goals lead to the necessity of ensuring that the system is accepted by its final users. Given this need, a preliminary study was performed to analyze the usability of the Platform from the point of view of young people. However, it is also crucial that the ecosystem meets usability criteria for the facilitators, due to their role of encouraging young people to participate and serving as a guide in the conversations taking place within communities, as well as in the research projects developed by the young people about different topics related to the digital society. Therefore, a usability study targeting facilitators was carried out to reach insights about how these users value the system’s usability. This usability study was performed through a combination of two techniques, a heuristic analysis by experts and the Computer System Usability Questionnaire to collect the experience of the real users.