Avaliação de comunicabilidade do portal coordenação do SIGAA em plataforma web

Abstract

With the growth and development of Higher Education Institutions, there is an increasing need to adopt an academic information system to manage the university with respect to people and processes. As an example of an academic system we have SIGAA, which was developed and implemented by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) and that after a few years arrived at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC). Within this system, there are several modules, among them the Graduação (undergraduate), which gives access to the Portal Coordenação (coordination portal), the target of our research. In this portal, coordinator, deputy coordinator and secretary administer a UFC undergraduate course. With so many functions on this portal, how does the system present and organize them? Do the users know all of them and know how to use them correctly? To answer these questions about the use and the interface, it is necessary to conduct a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research on communicability. For this, we chose two methods to guide the research: the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM) and the Communicability Evaluation Method (CEM). The two methods were applied together, so that the results would complement each other. The difference between them is that the SIM was only performed by the evaluator, who inspected the interface for problems, and the CEM involved eight users, from different profiles and teaching areas of the UFC. It was possible to conclude from the results that many users did not know certain functions of the portal or they did not remember the way that one day did. While observing that designers were concerned with letting the users know what they were doing, in many cases, these explanations were not able to reach the users effectively, and they had difficulty in finding some options as well as performing certain tasks. Some problems were evidenced in the results of the two methods and were reaffirmed in the interview. Therefore, we can say that the users only had good performance in the functions that they already knew and they had difficulty to execute functions that they did not know, suggesting points of improvement in the system.