Because of this vital importance of critical incident data and the opportunity for users to capture it, the over-arching goal of this work is to develop and evaluate a remote usability evaluation method for capturing critical incident data and satisfying the following criteria:

• tasks are performed by real users
• users are located in normal working environments
• users self-report own critical incidents
• data are captured in day-to-day task situations
• no direct interaction is needed between user and evaluator during an evaluation session
• data capture is cost-effective
• data are high quality and therefore relatively easy to convert into usability problems

Several methods have been developed for conducting usability evaluation without direct observation of a user by an evaluator. However, none of these existing remote evaluation methods (nor even traditional laboratory-based evaluation) meets all the above criteria. The result of working toward this goal is the user-reported critical incident method, described in this thesis.

The User-Reported Critical incident Method for Remote Usability Evaluation (PDF, 1.8 MB)