Identifying Design Guidelines of Interactive Whiteboard Interfaces Through Usability Evaluation

Interactive whiteboards are used to make classroom teaching and discussion easier and are used in all levels of educational classes, corporate conference rooms, coaching studios, television studios, and the like. Interactive whiteboards need to be usable and user-friendly for the end-users having diverse backgrounds (e.g., education, familiarity with such systems, etc.). Thus, the objectives of this study are to evaluate the interfaces of the whiteboards to reveal their usability problems and to provide possible design guidelines to improve the usability of such embedded systems. To attain these objectives, two interactive whiteboards were evaluated through a heuristic evaluation (HE) and a user study. The HE was carried out with four experts, followed by a user study replicated with seven participants. As outcomes, the studies revealed several usability problems grouped into seven categories; which include, for example, inconsistent use of icons, deep navigation, lack of accelerators, and absence of flexibility. Design guidelines along with the prototypical design were then proposed to solve the revealed problems and to improve the usability of interactive whiteboards.