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experts, ended being a system that was accepted and useful for end users. This
result is a well-known problem related to usability evaluation methods based on
the cognitive engineering strategies [ 8 , 30 , 33 ]. Several authors claim that con-
ventional usability evaluation methods like heuristic evaluation [ 22 ] and even
exploratory methods like the cognitive walkthrough [ 6 ] are not appropriate for
analyzing Web 2.0 or social networking sites. These studies argue that the results
of the adopted inspection methods do not reflect the users' opinions because, as
also verified in our case study, despite these methods pointing out unusable
systems, other experiments with end users have highlighted enthusiasms and
usefulness in using them. For example, in [ 30 ] the authors found that YouTube
failed when tested using heuristic evaluation although it is one of the most popular
Web environments.
Therefore, in some situations “usability evaluations, wrongfully applied, can
quash potentially valuable ideas early in the design process, incorrectly promote
poor ideas, misdirect developers into solving minor instead of major problems or
ignore (or incorrectly suggest) how a design would be adopted and used in everyday
practice” [ 12 ]. The innovative ideas which are at the basis of some interactive
environments, especially in novel collaborative contexts, must not be discouraged
by some negative results of usability evaluations, but they must rely on the enthusi-
asm of users demonstrated during testing.
With these considerations in mind, this section aims to define a new usability
method able to extend classic usability inspection analysis in order to take into
consideration issues related to social network systems and systems devoted to a
wider audience including users with special needs.
As already pointed out in Sect. 13.3.1 , even if several standards and models were
proposed to study the usability facets of an interactive system, the absence of a
unique and consolidated set of guidelines has led us to start with the QUIM model
and to extend it in order to take into account guidelines supporting designers and
developers in designing and implementing collaborative environments accessible
and usable also by users with special needs.
The first step for reaching our goal involved redefining some usability QUIM
factors specifically important for our aim. In particular, we focused on specific
QUIM factors such as productivity , learnability , accessibility , universality , accept-
ability , and usefulness . The first two factors, productivity and learnability, can give
useful indications in designing environments in which the user is an active producer
of knowledge. By contrast, the succeeding three factors provide useful indications
for the possibility to design interactive environments for all. Finally, the last factor,
the usefulness, is used to measure how much an easy-to-use system is also relevant
for actual users' needs. A second step in the development of our model was devoted
to extend the QUIM model to consider factors for improving the communicability
in interactive systems. This extension relies on studies carried out in [ 8 , 33 ]in
which the authors proposed to extend the classic heuristic evaluation model using a
set of new heuristics to describe aspects related to the design of social environments
developed adopting Web 2.0 technologies. Starting from these studies we propose
to integrate the QUIM model with a new factor related to the communicability of
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