Analyzing Non-verbal Cues in Usability Evaluation Tests

Verbal data is the primary focus for analysis in the prevalent Usability evaluations like in ‘Think Aloud Method’. This study involves 18 cross cultural TA tests and it was found that users use gestures profoundly to communicate their mental activities. It was observed that hand gestures are attempts to communicate abstract feelings as well as to quantify, to simplify a complex expression & refer to fuzzy thoughts. 10 further TA tests, with close up cameras for capture of facial expressions yielded gestures of affect states of surprise, satisfaction, confusion, deep thinking, frustration and boredom being experienced by the user. Most importantly, the users were either verbally silent or were using words seemingly incongruent to verbalisation. Observing that there is rich meaning in gestures, this paper argues for gestures as additional data sources in TA analysis.