Evaluating Usability of a Positive Behavior Reward App for Faculty and Students at a Local Elementary and Intermediate School

A Hawaii public elementary and intermediate school has recently introduced a positive behavior support system to try and combat high rates of both absent students and behavioral occurrences. This system centers around teaching focused school-appropriate behaviors and explicitly rewarding those behaviors with a paper dollar. However, students have been using these paper dollars inappropriately by stealing, bullying, and buying black market items from each other.

To address this problem, the purpose of this usability study was to develop and evaluate the ease of use and preference of a smartphone application that rewards the student’s points in which they can then use on physical items and school-wide events. The app was developed using the platform Bubble.is (https://bubble.is/site/weispbisbucks/), and mobile interface design principals drove the development process. Three rounds of usability testing, for both students and teachers, were conducted. Testing sessions included pre-surveys that aided in determining participant eligibility.

During testing, a usability protocol script was used to assist in the measurement of time on task and number of clicks per task. At the end of each session, participants completed post attitudinal surveys and revisions were made between each iteration of testing and relied on participant feedback. Feedback from participants indicated that they preferred the smartphone application to the physical dollar system due to its ease of awarding points, safety, and organization. All participants, students and teachers, strongly agreed that this app should replace the current physical dollar system.