What is the definition of heuristic evaluation?
A “discount usability engineering method” / “rapid method”
What are the pros of heuristic evaluation?
- Intended to be cheap and cost effective
- Used by small companies lacking time, expertise, and labs
-Structured - good method for novices
What are the top 10 Usability Heuristics
- Visibility of system status
- Match between & The real world
- User control and freedom
- Consistency & Standards
- Error prevention
- Recognition rather than recall
- Flexibility & Efficiency of use
- Aesthetic and minimalist design
- Help users recognise, diagnose, & recover from errors
- Help & Documentation
What is the definition of 1. Visibility of system status?
The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time
What is the definition of 2. Match between & The real world?
The system should speak the users’ language with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms
Example: Desktop
What is the definition of 3. User Control and Freedom?
Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue
Example: Support undo and redo
What is the definition of 4. consistency & standards?
Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions
What is the definition of 5. error prevention?
To have good error prevention as well as error messages if an error occurs
What is the definition of 6. recognition rather than recall?
- Make objects, actions, and options visible
- The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another
- Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate
What is a way to increase 7. flexibility & efficiency of use?
- Using accelerators - unseen by the novice user, but would speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system caters for inexperience and experienced users
- Allows users to tailor frequent actions
What is the definition of 8. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design?
- Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed
How to improve 9. Help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors?
- Error messages should
- be expressed in plain language (no codes)
- precisely indicate the problem, and
- constructively suggest a solution
What should 10. Help and documentation include:
- Information should:
- be easy to search
- be focused on the user’s task
- list concrete steps to be carried out
- not be too large
What are Shneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules?
- Strive for consistency
- Cater to universal usability
- Offer informative feedback
- Design dialogs to yield closure
- Prevent errors
- Permit easy reversal of actions
- Support internal locus of control
- Reduce short-term memory load
Benefits of Heuristic Evaluation
- It is fast & often inexpensive
- It can be used early in development process (before users or prototypes)
- way of focusing a later user-based evaluation
- Good when access to users is limited
- applicable for paper, prototypes, and working systems
- good for companies lacking time and labs
Cons of Heuristic Evaluation
- It requires expertise (can be difficult to source)
- needs a minimum of 3 experts for a good coverage
- It does not involve representative end-users
- tends to exaggerate number and severity of problems
- uncertain applicability for very novel designs
What is the difference between heuristic evaluation vs user testing?
- Usability experts are better than developers/non-experts at identifying the most serious errors
- But Usability experts find twice as many minor problems as major.
- Usability experts better at predicting users’ reactions
- Usability experts are good at identifying improvements
- No inspection method is as good as testing with users
Why should we know the severity of usability problems?
-It helps to:
- classify defects
- provide a basis for fixing strategy
How to rate scope?
How many users experienced the usability problem?
How to rate frequency?
In how many tasks did the usability problem occur?
How to rate impact?
- How much of the task time was used to recover?
- How often did the problem prevent users from completing the task?
What does SMART stand for?
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time bound
