Heuristic Evaluation: A Critique-Based Approach to Software Evaluation

🔍 Heuristic evaluation is a critique-based approach to evaluating software.

👥 Peer critique can provide valuable feedback before user testing, redesigning an application, convincing stakeholders, and before releasing software.

🎯 Having a clear goal in heuristic evaluation is important, even if unexpected insights are gained.

Heuristic evaluation is a technique used to identify usability problems in a design.

It involves providing a set of heuristics or principles to evaluators who independently identify problems in the design.

The evaluators then gather and discuss their findings, leading to a collective wisdom of crowds benefit.

🔑 Nielsen's ten heuristics are a great starting point for usability evaluation.

⚙️ Include specific design goals and observations from competitive analysis in your list of heuristics.

🔍 Having multiple evaluators is beneficial as they find different problems, but there's a point where adding more evaluators becomes less effective.

⚡ Heuristic evaluation is a cost-effective method for finding problems in a user interface.

✅ Evaluators are more likely to find severe problems, but multiple evaluators are needed to cover the majority of issues.

⏰ Heuristic evaluation is faster than user testing and provides pre-interpreted results, but it may generate false positives.

✨ Cycling through different evaluation methods can provide valuable feedback for software design.

🔑 Steps for heuristic evaluation include briefing evaluators, conducting the evaluation, assigning severity ratings, and producing an aggregate report.

👥 Background information and training should be tailored to match the intended user experience for evaluators.

🔍 Design heuristics help identify and address problems efficiently.

💡 Missing elements in the user interface should be clarified and addressed.

⚖️ Severity ratings combine frequency, impact, and pervasiveness to prioritize problem fixing.

🔑 Heuristic evaluation is a method to analyze and improve user interfaces.

💡 RTA Robbie found a problem in a mobile interface where the weight entry element couldn't be edited after entering the weight.

💭 Debriefing with the design team after the evaluation allows discussion of general interface issues and brainstorming of future design ideas.