The first evaluation of the user-friendliness of our survey
I designed a survey, which was hosted on Qualtrics, to gather information on medical students' self-rated levels of comfort behaviors when discussing issues related to sexuality in a clinical setting, knowledge on the topic of sex, personality traits, and demographics at baseline (i.e. prior to the intervention/their attendance of the workshops).
It is essential that any research tool is easily understandable and usable. After a survey is designed, the first level of assessment that I would typically employ is a heuristic evaluation. Insights from this assessment would inform the redesign of the survey. The second level of assessment would be a usability test.
In this section, I describe my heuristic evaluation process.
Learn about the research
This was part of a research project that I designed and led with a multinational team of educators, practitioners, and researchers. Findings from this study were published in a Q1 academic journal, Sex Education.
Heuristic evaluation of the baseline survey
Six evaluators with a background in psychology independently examined, based on a set of criteria, whether the survey was user-friendly. Below is a sample of the criteria used, which overlapped with Jakob’s 10 Usability Heuristics. In our evaluation, we placed more weight on users’ potential comprehension of the questions and instructions because the final users of the survey (the participants from the actual study) would be self-administering it online in their own free time. In the evaluation sheet, evaluators could input their general notes, highlight any issues, and provide recommended solutions.
I synthesized the 6 evaluations and amended the survey to address the highlighted usability issues to prepare for the usability tests.