Evaluation and Application of Scenario Based Design on Thunderbird

Scenario based design (SBD) approach has been widely used to improve the user interface (UI) design of interactive systems. In this paper, the effectiveness of using the SBD approach is shown to improve the UI design of the Thunderbird email system. Firstly, an empirical evaluation of the system was performed based on the user comments. Then, a low fidelity prototype of the modified interfaces was developed. Furthermore, the new design interfaces were evaluated using two evaluation methods: a) GOMS keystroke level model was used to compare the efficiency of two interfaces b) Heuristic Evaluation of the system was performed using Nielsen's usability heuristics. The evaluation results show that the efficiency of accomplishing important and most discussed tasks is improved significantly. Applying SBD approach on email systems is concluded as a promising trend to enhance usability.