Does environment affect the user experience?

Abstract: Many organizations use the internet to reach out to their customers and also offer many services through their websites. Organizations prefer usability study on their developed systems to compare their product/system with the competitors and also to find the difficulties, while real users work on the system. Usability helps organizations to know whether targeted users are able to use the developed system without any problems. Usability testing normally takes place in a controlled environment and conclusions are drawn based on the obtained results. But today’s world has entirely changed with the introduction of better technologies and the people are using products everywhere with the help of portable devices like smart phones, tablet pc devices, portable laptops etc. Many researches previously experimented to evaluate the noise effects on participant’s performance and then derived conclusions of its effects. This research is aimed to find the chances of the results of usability testing getting effected in noisy environment compared to controlled environment. Task-Based Usability testing technique was used to find the noise effects in terms of task success rate and task completion time and also, SUS (System Usability Scale) is used to calculate changes in user’s assessments. Total 30 participants had participated in this study and all the participants were divided into two groups each consisting of 15 participants. One of the groups has participated in usability testing on selected websites in noisy environment while another group in normal environment. This study produced two different results; first result proves the task success rate and task completion times were affected by the noisy environment and user’s performance was better in calm environment compared to noisy environment. Second result shows user’s assessment IS not affected in any environment. The above situations have been discussed in detail.