W3D2: Heuristic Evaluation

Background

Why Heuristic Evaluation?

So you’ve come up with lots of possible designs and prototyped a few. Where do you go from there? test them!

  • Formative evaluation: “What can we improve for the next iteration?”. real users but in-lab. Qualitative observations (problems, ideas)
  • Field study: “Is this working in the real world?”. real users in their own environment. Qualitative observations
  • Controlled experiment: “Which title gets more clicks?”. quantitative data.
  • Heuristic evaluation: “What can we fix before putting it in front of users?”. experts evaluate the design against a set of principles.

User testing with actual users can be expensive and time-consuming. To get the most benefit from that effort, we want to try to find and fix as many problems as we can before we get to that stage. Heuristic evaluation is a way to do that.

Heuristics

Heuristics are guidelines and vocabulary for design principles. Useful for:

  • choosing between design alternatives
  • finding problems

Nielsen’s:

  1. Match between system and the real world. “speak the user’s language”
  2. Consistency and standards. “follow conventions”, when you mean the same thing, use the same word
  3. Help and documentation. “easy to search”, “focused on the user’s task”, “not too large”
  4. User control and freedom. “undo and redo”, “back”
  5. Visibility of system status. “feedback”, progress indicators / responsiveness
  6. Flexibility and efficiency: can frequent users go fast? shortcuts?
  7. Error prevention. “are you sure?”
  8. Recognition rather than recall. don’t type when you can select
  9. Error reporting, diagnosis, and recovery. errors in plain language, suggest a solution
  10. Aesthetic and minimalist design. “every extra unit of information competes with the relevant units of information”

For more background, see the Heuristic Evaluation reading.

Activity

We’ll do a heuristic evaluation of a Calvin website or app.

Instructions

  1. Split into groups of 2 or 3.
  2. Pick a website or app for the team to evaluate. See the list below. Each team should pick a different one.
  3. Pick an evaluation methodology; see the top section of the Heuristic Evaluation reading.
  4. Individually, evaluate the website or app using the chosen methodology. Take notes.
  5. After 10 minutes, as a group, discuss your findings and come up with a list of the top 3-5 issues. Write an evaluation report; see “Writing Good Heuristic Evaluations” in the reading. Write your issues on a shared document in the class Teams.

What to evaluate?

Ideally we’ll evaluate an interactive website or app, not just a static display of information. Here are some possibilities:

Discussion

Discuss these among your teams first, then we’ll come back together to share our experiences.

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