Google+ evaluation results

On the 20^th of September 2011 after a test period of about three months, Google released Google+, its social network site, for the general public. It introduces some new concepts such as Circles to organise contacts and Hangouts for video chat. In order to get an idea of what users think of the application we conducted a small evaluation. This article presents a summary of our results. A more extensive document can be found here.

QUIS survey

Our adapted QUIS survey is available now! The original approach is unchanged, but we added some questions on general information:

• Age class
• IT experience
• Time spent on social networks
• Time spent on Google+
  
• Use of other Google+ products

Participation in our evaluation is quick and easy. You can find our form at www.evalgoogleplus.tk

UI annoyances

In daily life, we encounter usability issues all the time. This can be in software, but it is applicable to general design as well. This article highlights some examples of bad design choices, both in everyday objects and software.

UI Annoyances: BNP Paribas Fortis

Internet has become very popular thanks to the new technological developments in internet technology. People are doing their daily tasks via internet and it saves us a lot of time and reduces the overhead. One of the applications we often make use of is internet banking. It has many benefits over old-fashioned banking where people have to visit a bank in order to fulfil their needs. Internet banking can be a useful alternative. However, as the remainder of the text points out, it might have some issues of its own.

Actions for test-users

We'll ask some test-users to perform following actions in Google+ during the think-aloud interviews:

1. Register on Google+
2. Add one of us to the circle of acquaintances
3. Create a new circle, add someone to that circle and delete the circle
4. Start a videochat (without mentioning it's called a hangout)
5. Log out
6. Delete user profile (advanced)

These tasks must be completed without us giving any additional information. While the test-users perform these tasks, the sequence of screens, the thoughts of the test users while performing the tasks and the duration will be recorded.

Result first group meeting

We just finished our first group meeting to discuss the evaluation techniques we're going to use for Google+. We decided to send out a QUIS questionnary with some additional questions about the participants' background. This is an excellent and well-established method to quickly gain insight in the user's experience for various aspects of an application. However, we also intend to cross-validate the results obtained with this questionnary by some 'lightweight' think-aloud interviews. Several users will be asked to perform typical tasks in Google+, while explaining what they're doing to the interviewer. Both the screen and audio will be recorded. These data allow us to compare tendencies in detailed cases with the larger picture. The questionnaire is being prepared and will be available before next week. We'll keep you posted.

Getting started

Welcome to our blog! We are CHIll, one of the Master student teams enrolled in the User Interfaces course at the KULeuven. In the coming months, we'll post regular updates on our work, based on the given topics. Up next: evaluation of Google+ from a user point of view. Any constructive comments you may want to share are a welcome addition. Follow us (and the other teams) on Twitter as well: #chikul12