On June 20, a message was posted to the ubc.cs.undergrad newsgroup asking for undergraduate volunteers to participate in the web evaluation. Some people volunteered suggestions and/or time in helping us to do the evaluation.

The web evaluation game is called Card Sort. It is based on the card sorting technique described by Sun Microsystems' Jakob Nielsen and Netscape Communication's Darrell Sano in "User Interface Design for Sun Microsystem's Internal Web". This technique is also described in the article "Applying Discount Usability Engineering", by Jakob Nielsen. The undergraduate web evaluation game is similar to the web evaluation games for the Department Web.

Card Sort is done individually by each participant. This prevents a participant from being influenced by the ideas other participants.

In Card Sort, items are written down and sorted into groups. Each group is then given a name. In this case, the items minor categories (subsections) from the Undergraduate Labs section of the Undergraduate Web. The groups will be the basis of the major categories at the top of the Undergraduate Labs section. A participant has the freedom to add new items. A participant can also put "irrelevant" items into a group called "TRASH". In order to have a consistent evaluation process, each participant must follow a set of rules in doing this web evaluation game.

After the participants have completed the game, the results are analyzed and are summarized in the Results section. We hope that the game results will show us which items should not be included in the Undergraduate Labs section as well as which items should be added to that section. More importantly, we hope that the game results will provide us with more intuitive major categories (and category names) at the top of the Undergraduate Labs section.

Would you like to go back to the Ugrad Web Evaluation Page or back to my homepage?