Usability evaluation of a state university grade encoding system

Abstract

Computerized encoding and posting of grades every end of an academic period is designed to provide convenience to teaching personnel with huge number of students like in the case of a state university. The initial assessment of usability experience showed that the rating was significantly below satisfactory level. Thus, the researchers conducted a usability test to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the users. A three-phased usability test involved pre-task survey, scenario and tasks performance and post-task survey. The respondents evaluated the system in terms of different usability measures such as consistency, error tolerability, learnability, memorability, efficiency and likeability. The result primarily revealed that manual encoding and importing worksheet both occupied most of the performance time. In addition, learnability and memorability had the lowest satisfactory rating among respondents. As a result, this lead to the development of ergonomic interventions to enhance the usability experience of grade encoding system.