6th Annual Judith Ramaley Celebration of Research and Creative Scholarship
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Poster #66 A Usability Study on Band Saw Blade Estimators Tyler Kulig Faculty Mentors: Gerald Cichanowski and Mingrui Zhang Designing a good user interface requires usability testing on some scale. Fastenal is a company which sells industrial and construction supplies and offers services including inventory management, manufacturing and tool repair. Fastenal evaluates programs on three standards: effectiveness, efficiency and scalability. One type of item that is sold is called band saw blades. Fastenal’s band saw blade ordering system hasn’t been drastically changed in over 15 years. The two methods brought into question are the old Macro Excel style, which is the current format, and a newly created web based style. Fastenal employees acting as test subjects processed orders on both ordering systems (Web and Macro). The newer more intuitive style is compared against the old defined type. The study conducted showed that the new web based style was overall favored more for its ease and its non-confusing page flow. Most users whether they have used the old application before or not rated it higher in almost every category. Although the Macro style wasn’t always graded as poor by the subjects, the web based style was scored higher by those same subjects. |
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