【作者】 张海昕； 刘正捷； 奚小玲； 窦赫男；

【Author】 Haixin Zhang 1+, Zhengjie Liu 1, Xiaoling Xi 1, Henan Dou 1 1 (Sino European Usability Center, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian 116026, China)

【机构】 中国欧盟可用性研究中心大连海事大学计算机学院；

【摘要】 跨国公司越来越注重自己的中文网站的建设。然而在进行中文网站的设计时必须要有一些切实可行的方法应用于对全球网站本地化过程的指导。根据我们最近对一些跨国公司的中文网站所开展的可用性研究工作,本文探索了边做边说方法在网站评估中的应用过程,列举了一些网站的页面设计中所存在的问题,并对这种方法的优点和不足进行了总结。更多还原

【Abstract】 Multinational companies pay more attention to their Chinese website now than before. There should be some practicable methods that can be used to guide Chinese website design during the global websites of these companies are localized. Think-aloud protocols, in which user verbalize their thoughts while interacting with a system or product to perform specified tasks, provide an effective and economical assessment of the target audience’s ability to use a proposed system. User’s verbalizing thoughts include their intent, their anticipation to the system, their comprehension of the system, and description about their operations. Among all usability engineering methods used to study whether a Chinese website of those multinational companies accords with Chinese people’s usage and pattern, think-aloud might be the most valuable one, for major problems with comprehension and usability can be identified early in the development process with a small number or users’ performance and comments. Based on several recent usability researches of those kinds of Chinese website, this paper examines the use of think-aloud protocols in website evaluation. Firstly, this paper introduces how to carry out think-aloud protocols in the evaluation process. Usability engineers must analyze product or its prototype to make sure which are critical tasks. Then preparing test materials, inviting real user representatives to participate in, recording what participants do, what they say and their puzzle and emotion are the things should be done in succession. The analysis of the results and the reports should be given, and it is better to propose some possible solutions and useful recommendations. Secondly, some concrete examples of usability problems about those multinational companies’ Chinese website reviewed by us are presented in this paper, such as not offering simple and natural dialogue, not speaking user’s language, culture difference issue, inconsistency and incomplete system functions. Thirdly, a brief examination of advantages and limitations of this method is introduced at the last part of this paper. The method’s benefit is its simplicity and easy to use, and its disadvantage is not suitable for performance measurement.更多还原