What are evaluation techniques for HCI projects (without involving users, or psychologist)?

Question

I'm going to choose a topic for my thesis and it will be a HCI project. (human computer interaction).

It will be a research project, and I need to think some kind of evaluation for it. I would prefer to not use human users or having to collaborate with psychologist for it.

Is there any metric, or evaluation models I could use instead?

Answer 1

You seem to have missed the point of the first word of the acronym - Human.

You will have to set some sort of criteria for evaluating success in a task and let people try the task.

Different ways to achieve the task can then be compared and contrasted to each (i.e. how many people succeeded in completing the task. With prompting, without etc...).

If you are worried about cost, here is an article about doing usability labs cheaply.

Answer 2

Uhh, not having users would kind of defeat the point of a human-computer interface research project.

Answer 3

It's called "heuristic evaluation." The alternative to real users is to have design experts do a "cognitive walkthrough" of your application, and evaluate it against a set of design heuristics.

This is not as good as a real user study, but it is very easy. But I agree with the other answers that this is a horrible way to go to school.

Answer 4

A HCI project could also involve a meta-analysis of data gathered in multiple other HCI (user) studies. You might be able to identify a valuable new way of considering the data from existing studies, or a way of considering the relationships between existing HCI studies.