Today all members of the eRaUI team met up to discuss progress, with a particular emphasis on work package 3 and work package 4 deliverables. In this meeting we concentrated primarily on the importance of usability within eRaUI. We have decided that enhancing usability within eRaUI is our top priority, and we intend to approach this by making use of the fresh perspectives gleaned from the recent JISC meeting in Birmingham. Yanguo and Sahithi (eRaUI project members) are both experts in usability and are able to apply their expertise to ensure that eRaUI encapsulates the essential principles required to facilitate usability.
One of the key approaches to enhancing usability will be via testing, which we intend to carry out as part of our work package 4 deliverables. We require a scanrio for testing, and will need to consider some different use cases for which we can test eRaUI effectively. In accordance with Sahithi's suggestion, we intend to create an experimental and control task, the latter for instance being conducted on the the NaCTeM website while the former is conducted using the eRaUI widget deployed upon the NaCTeM widget. By measuring the times taken to achieve a set task upon both versions of NaCTeM, we are able to measure benchmarks for usability and verify that our goals are being achieved.
We are also considering the idea of adding some new features to the widget interface of eRaUI which are specifically intended to enhance usability and acceessibility. For instance, this could take the form of a feature to address accessibility for people who are visually impaired. We are also keen to enhance existing features in such a way as to ensure that usability is maximized.
