Subjective Duration Assessment

Uzilla.net is testing a solution for assessing ease of use without the typical risk of bias inherent in subjective satisfaction scales.  Quoting work by Czerwinski, Horvitz and Cutrell:

RSD (relative subjective duration) has several uses, including a probe for difficulty that bypasses the bias toward the positive end of the scale typically seen in user satisfaction ratings after software usability studies.

The process is elegantly simple.  After each task, the user is asked to estimate the time it took to accomplish the task. This estimate is compared to the actual time the task took, recorded in precise detail by the Uzilla.net system.  Over-estimations indicate user frustration with the task and in the study cited, the ratio of estimated to actual time was highly correlated with task success rate. For example, a user prompt might look like:

Task Duration

Please estimate the duration of the previous task:
  seconds

For more, read:
Czerwinski, M., Horvitz, E. & Cutrell, E. (2001). Subjective Duration Assessment: An Implicit Probe for Software Usability. In Proceedings of IHM-HCI 2001 Conference, Volume 2, (September, 2001, Lille, France), p. 167-170.

|||
Posted at 21:41