A usability evaluation of SEESAW, a mobile-based kiosk app

Abstract

SEESAW is a mobile kiosk-based app that aims to teach research ethics and integrity principles to students and researchers. The app incorporates various interactive components such as polls, and sorting activities, which aim to engage its users via two decision-making scenarios. This paper evaluates the usability of the app using a mixed-methods approach. This combines USE (Usefulness, Satisfaction, Easy of Use) questionnaires along with a heuristic evaluation and qualitative feedback from users. Our findings reveal that participants perceived SEESAW positively with a high overall rating in terms of learnability, ease-of-use, and user satisfaction. User feedback has also highlighted a few issues with components that violated several heuristics and which could be improved – such as providing more use control, better consistency, and the introduction of better error recovery mechanisms. These findings underscore the need for balancing the guided nature of learning activities with providing more control and freedom to users. Finally, the study offers several insights for the design of kiosk-based applications which can help developers design better interactive experiences within educational contexts.