HCI Design Methods in CBA: Lessons Learned and Recommendations Based on a Concept Map Use Case

This paper focuses on the user-centered design of a computer-based assessment (CBA) instrument for knowledge measurement. We describe relevant design steps in general and illustrate them via the design of our usability improved CBA concept map instrument (ISO 9241-11, 1998; ISO 9241-210, 2010). We discuss design versus evaluation methods from a human-computer interaction (HCI) perspective and emphasize important design steps relevant for constructing usability improved assessment instruments in educational assessment. As these HCI methods are still seldom applied to CBA, this paper helps alleviate the dearth of literature and guidelines in this domain. Our objective is thus to provide the reader with a series of design recommendations for CBA, as derived both from HCI research; and to summarize lessons learned from our specific CBA design use case.