Assignment 6: heuristics.
This evaluation is a good supplement for other testing procedures. We did heuristics evaluations at the same time we were doing usability testing, but I can see it being used with personas or competitive analysis.
This method seems to me to be, essentially, self-administered usability testing. since we had spent so much time on the site already, we knew the various paths a user takes for typical site use, and we took some more time to play around and really scrutinize points of the site’s design which we have slowly been trained to notice over the course of this class. Of course, many of us also reported problems we observed while conducting our usability testing, emphasizing how important it is to have input from both the inside and the outside, from “experts” and unfamiliar and untrained sources.
This is a pretty great evaluation, though. It identifies problems, but because it’s done by the designers or professionals, solutions can be offered on the spot, too. I spent plenty of time elaborating on the ways I hoped or expected features to work, meaning them as suggestions for future design.
As I said, though, while “expert” input is valuable, it can’t cover all the bases and it’s hard-put to point out the problems non-experts and fresh eyes can encounter. Fortunately, it only requires at least one person to conduct, as long as they are familiar with heuristics and severity ratings. Not that it isn’t better to have more than one evaluator. In class, we ended up with a sort of long tail of issues, which were mostly pointed out by one or two members of a class of .. however large our class is.
This evaluation takes a matter of hours per evaluator, depending on the depth of the assessment and the size of the product, but can be conducted at any point where there is a model or product to see. It may also cost money, if no “experts” can be found to work for free. It’s still generally cheaper, in terms of both time and money, than usability testing, though, since the number of people conducting heuristic evaluation will almost always be the smaller pool.
