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"This work describes an eye tracking study of the e-learning system Moodle outlining how Moodle’s learning materials are explored, selected and processed. The goal of this study was to investigate several cognitive variables and the exploratory learning processes itself. The experiment addressed research objectives such as the individual order of selecting learning material, the visual scanning of Moodle's environment, the importance of "Gestalt laws" respectively rules of pre-attentive perception, the influence of the involvement-factor as well as usability aspects. "

This study evaluated the usability of three of the most popular social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, and Orkut) with first-time users. Results revealed issues related to confusing terminology, inadequate feedback and error messages, and improper link location impacted user performance and satisfaction.

Optimizing the interaction As a usability professional, ergonomist or HCI researcher, you often need to study people interacting with products or interfaces in a natural environment.

Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites.

"The retrospective think-aloud method, in which participants work in silence and verbalize their thoughts afterwards while watching a recording of their performance, is often used for the evaluation of websites. However, participants may not always be able to recall what they thought, when they only see few visual cues that help them remembering their task execution process. In our study we complemented the recording of the performance with a gaze trail of the participant" eye movements, in order to elicit more verbalizations. A comparison was made between the traditional retrospective think-aloud protocols and the variant with eye movements. Contrary to our expectations, no differences were found between the two conditions on numbers of problems, the ways these problems were detected, and types of problems. Two possible explanations for this result are that eye movements might be rather confronting and distracting for participants, and the rather generic way of probing we used. The added value might be stronger when specific questions are asked, based on the observed eye movements. Implications for usability practitioners are discussed in the conclusions of this paper."

"Usability practitioners often rely on research participants' verbal reports to better understand the user experience. These reports can be collected either during or after task execution, with each approach entailing unique benefits and limitations. This note presents a framework for using eye tracking data to "trigger" when and how moderators probe participants for verbal comments during task execution to supplement or elaborate participant-initiated comments. A preliminary case study suggests that this approach affords a level of efficiency and effectiveness difficult to achieve with retrospective verbalization or without the use of eye tracking. The hope is that practitioners will be encouraged to use and refine this method for the benefit of the field."

These reports are based on 2 rounds of usability studies with real users, reporting how they actually used a broad variety of iPad apps as well as websites accessed on the iPad.

Normally, it wouldn't be worth doing a new study this soon: usability guidelines change very slowly because they derive from human behavior, not technology. However, in this case, it's reasonable to conduct new research now, a year after the iPad launch.

Materialien, Vorlagen und Werkzeuge zur Durchführug von Usability Studien

Here's a list of 15 valuable Usability Papers in PDF form that you might not have heard of, but should know and can use:I thought I'd list a few helpful papers

Ministudie: Trick or Tweet: How Usable is Twitter for First-Time Users? (SURL was initiated in the Fall 1998 under the direction of Barbara S. Chaparro who has over 19 years of experience designing and evaluating user interfaces and conducting research in human-computer interaction (HCI). The goal of the lab is to provide usability services and research to the software development community and to train students on HCI with real-world projects.)

International Journal of Human-Computer Studies Volume 67, Issue 6, June 2009, Pages 533-549