Zhou Ronggang, Chan Alan H S
School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing, P. R. China.
Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, P. R. China.
Work. 2017;56(1):9-19. doi: 10.3233/WOR-162474.
In order to compare existing usability data to ideal goals or to that for other products, usability practitioners have tried to develop a framework for deriving an integrated metric. However, most current usability methods with this aim rely heavily on human judgment about the various attributes of a product, but often fail to take into account of the inherent uncertainties in these judgments in the evaluation process.
This paper presents a universal method of usability evaluation by combining the analytic hierarchical process (AHP) and the fuzzy evaluation method. By integrating multiple sources of uncertain information during product usability evaluation, the method proposed here aims to derive an index that is structured hierarchically in terms of the three usability components of effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of a product.
With consideration of the theoretical basis of fuzzy evaluation, a two-layer comprehensive evaluation index was first constructed. After the membership functions were determined by an expert panel, the evaluation appraisals were computed by using the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation technique model to characterize fuzzy human judgments. Then with the use of AHP, the weights of usability components were elicited from these experts.
Compared to traditional usability evaluation methods, the major strength of the fuzzy method is that it captures the fuzziness and uncertainties in human judgments and provides an integrated framework that combines the vague judgments from multiple stages of a product evaluation process.
为了将现有的可用性数据与理想目标或其他产品的数据进行比较，可用性从业者试图开发一个用于得出综合指标的框架。然而，目前大多数旨在实现这一目标的可用性方法严重依赖于对产品各种属性的人为判断，但在评估过程中往往没有考虑到这些判断中固有的不确定性。
本文提出一种结合层次分析法（AHP）和模糊评价法的通用可用性评价方法。通过在产品可用性评估过程中整合多种不确定信息来源，本文提出的方法旨在得出一个根据产品有效性、效率和用户满意度这三个可用性组件进行层次结构构建的指标。
考虑到模糊评价的理论基础，首先构建了一个两层综合评价指标。在由专家小组确定隶属函数后，使用模糊综合评价技术模型计算评价结果，以表征模糊的人为判断。然后运用层次分析法从这些专家那里得出可用性组件的权重。
与传统可用性评价方法相比，模糊方法的主要优势在于它捕捉了人为判断中的模糊性和不确定性，并提供了一个综合框架，该框架结合了产品评估过程多个阶段的模糊判断。
