Common Industry Format: Meeting Educational Objectives and Student Needs?

The Common Industry Format (CIF) provides an industry standard for the reporting of usability test results. The ongoing success of the CIF will in part be determined by the support of future IT professionals. The work reported in this paper describes our experience in adapting and using the CIF in an introductory Human-Computer Interaction course which is a core subject in a large proportion of the IT related degrees offered by our Australian University. It also examined subsequent student perceptions about the usefulness and ease of use of a CIF-style template and the degree to which they were able to generate CIF-compliant reports. It was found that few modifications to the template were required to meet the educational objectives of the course. Overall, students were neutral as to whether the CIF as a useful or easy to use device, but were able to generate moderately compliant reports. Comments from students indicated that more formal training in the CIF may be useful, rather than letting the template stand alone.