Systematic Usability and User Experience Evaluation as a Basis for the Redesign of an e-learning Platform

This paper introduces a methodology and results of the usability and user-experience evaluation of OpenScout portal which aims at providing skilland competency-based federated search and retrieval web services that enable users to easily find, access, adopt, use, tag and exchange free content for management education and training. Why usability and user-experience evaluation? In the process of developing such complex (web) applications and systems, developers are often not sufficiently aware of the criteria of usability as a key qualitative factor of the system, which measures the consistency of the product with the needs, goals and requirements of end users. Therefore many users have difficulties when interacting with a system which adversely effects on their effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction and have possible negative influence on decision to its future adoption. In our case a combination of usability evaluation methods (UEMs) were deployed: Eye-tracking, Retrospective Think-Aloud, Heuristic Evaluation, different Questionnaires and System Usability Scale to address the particularities of the portal and specific research goals: identification of usability problems (UPs) as well as user experience (UX) from which HCI experts can prepare redesign proposals for the prototype improvement.