Avaliação de usabilidade dos ícones que compõem a interface visual do sistema eletrônico de informação SEI/UFCG a partir de uma abordagem híbrida.

Abstract

Predictably, with the birth of technology, the activities present in public spheres would become digitalized. Nevertheless, services virtualization needed to be connected with the civil servants’ needs and aspirations and the public in general. Due to this, this research had the general goal of carrying out a usability evaluation of the visual elements that makes up the visual interface of the Electronic Information System – EIS, from the Federal University of Campina Grande – UFCG, using the icons as an object of study for this evaluation. The research was characterized as being applied, descriptive, and qualitative-quantitative (mixed), and data collection was carried out using a platform and digital forms. The scope of the research consisted of 78 professors from the UFCG using the EIS. A hybrid evaluation was validated in two forms: the first one dealt with the icon spontaneous comprehension methodology, used by the researcher Formiga (2001), and the second form was accomplished by the author of this paper, from the creation of a semantic differential scale using some of the usability quality indicators of an icon by Galitz (2007). The combination of these two methodologies showed some favorable results and it was possible to notice that they can be complementary, as the spontaneous evaluation showed a large number of terms for each icon, since users did not know the real name of the icon’s function. Regarding the semantic evaluation, it was noticed that users related the icon’s level of knowledge also to visual elements already seen on other platforms.