Evaluating and Testing User Interfaces for Engineering Education Tools: Usability Testing

Evaluation of users interfaces for engineering education tools such as E-learning is important to have enhanced real learning experiences in this domain. To this end, in order to have this experience, we conducted usability studies to see its impact. E-learning usability studies require the involvement of real end users. Different users with varying backgrounds and levels of human-computer interaction (HCI) knowledge behave differently when using e-learning tools. To study user behavior in the e-learning context, an empirical usability study on a specific e-learning tool was conducted. The study uses usability evaluation questionnaires collected from two different groups of Software Engineering Students: one group with HCI knowledge and the other without. The objective is to collect the technology enhanced learning experience from the real users to see the impact of engineering education. It is found that end users without HCI knowledge are more satisfied than those with HCI knowledge, as the latter have higher expectations concerning the tool.