Are you in an early stage of your product design or already have a finished product? You can apply heuristics principles and identify key interaction and usability issues its cheaper than usability testing but certainly not effective alternate as real user inputs. This could give way to detailed usability designs without having to spend more time and money.
2. Agenda
• What is Heuristic evaluation?
• Background
• Heuristic Evaluation Framework
• 10 usability Heuristics in usability engineering
• Advantages
• How to conduct a Heuristic evaluation?
3. What is Heuristic evaluation?
• The word heuristic refers to a rule of thumb adopted
based on an experience or common knowledge.
• Form of usability inspection where evaluators examine
the user interface and judge its compliance with
recognized usability principles (the "heuristics") for
usability problems.
• It is both
• Before design finalization- Predictive method
• After design completion – Evaluation and rating method
4. Background
• Developed by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich in 1990
• Main concepts are to improve analyzing the interface and judge
its compliance with recognized usability principles (Heuristics)
• External / carefully chosen experienced evaluators examine
usability-related aspects of UI by
• Analyzing the quality attribute’s
• Applying set of methods for improving ease-of-use during the design
process
• Increases efficiency, consumer satisfaction rates and learning
10. Available Guidelines
There are at-least 4 people who have put forward their guidelines
of which the most well known one is the Nielsen’s 10 principles
and the one which we would cover as part of this presentation.
• Nielsens’s 10 Principles
• Norman’s rule from design of ‘Everyday Things’
• Tognazzini’s 16 principles
• Shneiderman’s 8 golden rules
11. Norman’s rule from design of ‘Everyday
Things’
Affordances
Natural Mapping
Visibility
Feedback
12. Tognazzini’s 16 principles
• Anticipation
• Autonomy
• Color Blindness
• Consistency
• Defaults
• Efficiency of the User
• Explorable Interfaces
• Fitts's Law
• Human Interface Objects
• Latency Reduction
• Learnability
• Metaphors, Use of
• Protect Users' Work
• Readability
• Track State
• Visible Navigation
13. Shneiderman’s 8 golden rules
• Strive for consistency
• Enable frequent users to use shortcuts
• Offer informative feedback
• Design dialogue to yield closure
• Offer simple error handling
• Permit easy reversal of actions
• Support internal locus of control
• Reduce short-term memory load
17. Match between system and the real
world
• The application should speak the users' language
• Words and concepts from user’s world
• Don’t use specific engineering terms
• Focus on user’s point of view
19. User control and freedom
• Users often choose app functions by mistake and will need a clearly
marked emergency exit.
• Don’t trap users in a certain location
• Allow users to get back quickly and easily
• support exploration
• support undo consistently
• support interruption of long-lived events
21. Error prevention
• Confirmation option before they commit to the action
• Scrutinize every error message
• Can the error be prevented?
• allow recognition over recall when possible
• confirm risky operations
• avoid use of modes as much as possible
• use clear status indicators
• Detect when error occurs
• Allow user to recover from the error
23. Consistency and standards
• Follow platform conventions. Lack of continuity inhibits trust
• Consistent with user’s mental model
• Consistent with tasks
• Consistent with experience/expectations
• Consistent within and between apps
• Similar information in similar locations
• Use the same action sequence in different parts of the interface to get
similar results
27. Recognition rather than recall
• Minimize the user's memory load
• Show range or sample inputs
• Use generic actions across application
• Don’t make user remember things between actions
• Leave information on screen until not needed
29. Flexibility and efficiency of use
• Think of both inexperienced and
experienced users
• Help experienced users avoid long dialogs
or messages that they don’t need
• Strategies include:
• type- and click-ahead
• keyboard shortcuts
• good default values
• macros and scripting
• reuse/edit history
31. Help and documentation
• Always provide users with more information when they are looking for
it.
• Best if system can be used w/o manuals
• but may not be possible
• Documentation should be
• easy to search
• focused on the user's task
• list concrete steps to be carried out
33. Help users, Recognize, Diagnose, & Recover
from errors
• Clear and in simple language
• user can dig deeper to get obscure details
• State the problem / suggest solutions
• give links to the solutions, if possible
• Use a positive, non-accusatory tone
• Graceful error behavior
35. Advantages
• Quick and cost effective
• Feedback early in the design
process
• Identifies key interaction and
usability issues
• Helps in prioritizing design issues
to be tackled
• Provides direction for redesign
• Provides direction for res
• Compatible with other usability
testing methodologies each
design
37. When and What
When to use?
• Early in the project
• During Redesign
• Not for a new product
• Good for overall product or a
specific task flow
• You are Low on budget and time
What it is?
• Does not have a user involvement
• Not entirely scientific
• Has certain amount of subjectivity
• Multiple experts are better than
one
38. How to conduct a Heuristic
evaluation?
• Briefing
– teach to evaluators; ensure each person receives same briefing.
– become familiar with the UI and domain
• Evaluation period
– compare UI against heuristics
– spend 1-2 hours with interface; minimal 2 interface passes
– take notes
• Debriefing session
– Prioritize problems; rate severity
– aggregate results
– discuss outcomes with design/development team
39. How to conduct a Heuristic
evaluation?
Severity Ratings
• 0 – this is not a usability problem
• 1 – cosmetic problem only
• 2 – minor usability problem
• 3 – major usability problem
• 4 – usability catastrophe; imperative to fix
• Combination of frequency and impact
44. Best Practices
• Keep everything simple and clean. Don’t decorate.
• Try to include only one big idea per slide.
• Colors: For a small, simple deck, use only one color gradient
throughout. For larger decks, you can use different colored
segue slide per section, but try to be systematic.
• Use simple shapes to create visuals; not drop shadows or special
effects.
