Principles of Usability: Module 2

Started class with a quiz and handing in homework… Usability on the cheap. Different techniques: formal usability inspection, consistency inspections, standards inspections, guideline reviews, pluralistic walkthroughs, cognitive walkthroughs, heuristic evaluation. Heuristics: rules of thumb or guidelines, what are good practices? Examples: links should be obvious. Text should be easy to read.

Heuristic Evaluation is a usability engineering method for finding the usability problems in a user interface design so that they can be attended to as part of an iterative design process. Heuristic evaluation involves having a small set of evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles (the “heuristics”).

—Nielsen and Molich, 1990; Nielsen 1994

Have multiple people look for issues to catch as many as possible. Brief introduction to Jacob Neilsen’s work, and his mind-changing, and somewhat controversial ideas. His Usability Heuristics:

1. Visibility of system status: keep users informed about what is going on, appropriate feedback.
2. Match between system and real world: speak the user’s language, use familiar, real-world conventions, natural logical order.
3. User control and freedom: let users back out, exit (support undo and redo).
4. Consistency and standards: use standard conventions and language to help users know what to do.
5. Error Prevention: better than a good error message is preventing that error in the first place.
6. Recognition rather than recall: make objects, actions, and options visible. Avoid mystery meat navigation.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use: accelerators (keyboard shortcuts) speed up the interaction for the expert user, allow users to tailor frequent actions.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design: avoid irrelevant or rarely needed information, keep things focused.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: errors should be in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
10. Help and Documentation: even if it’s better for a system to be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Make it easy to search, focused to the use’s task, don’t be too large.

Exercise: heuristic evaluation of petrosains.com.my. Assignment: do a heuristic evaluation of whitehouse.gov. Organize your report by the 10 heuristics. Use example from appendix in textbook, page 444, and do a professional report. Also do reading assignments.

Unrelated Note:
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