Evaluating the user experience in CAA environments: what affects user satisfaction?

This paper reports the findings of an experiment to establish students’ satisfaction with various aspects of the user interface in three Computer Assisted Assessment (CAA) environments. Forty four second year undergraduate students in Human Computer Interaction participated in the study. Each student completed three tests using three different CAA software environments. Through the use of two survey instruments, user satisfaction was measured. The results highlight the fact that, in this instance, scrolling did not seem to influence student satisfaction but other attributes, such as navigational structure and question styles, appear to influence it. The students appeared to prefer different CAA environments depending on whether the context of use was for formative or summative assessment.