Evaluation

As with the other components for the website, the Cave Navigation component was evaluated through user testing. 24 students from UCT volunteered to take part in the evaluation and were asked to complete a few tasks using the system and then to answer a few questions relating to it. The results of the evaluation found the following:

In general, 13 of the 24 users agreed that the system as easy to use and 7 others strongly agreed with this. All but 1 user agreed that the system is usable, with 8 of those users strongly agreeing. These results indicate that users believe the system exhibits good usability and that they had a positive experience while using the system. Despite this, users could not come to a consensus on the learnability of the system. It is believed that the familiarity that some of the users had with games from the first person shooter genre may have had an impact on this. This is supported by the fact that 6 of the 9 users (a significant amount) who regularly play FPS games felt that they did not need training before they became skilful with the system.

Users were observed during the evaluation and it was noted that a number of them took the time to explore the cave and examine all of the images available rather than simply finding those that were required to complete the tasks. This, combined with questions asked by the participants after the evaluation had been concluded, indicates that there exists a possibility that the system led to them being more interested in the rock art.

These results are used to show that the system provides a useful and usable 3D cave navigation system that encourages learning about rock art.