Articles and resources tagged “heuristic evaluation”

How to prioritise usability problems

A typical usability test may return over 100 usability issues. How can you prioritise the issues so that the development team know which ones are the most serious? By asking just 3 questions of any usability problem, we are able to classify its severity as low, medium, serious or critical.

247 web usability guidelines

Although designing usable systems requires far more than simply applying guidelines, guidelines can still make a significant contribution to usability by promoting consistency and good practice. We use this list of guidelines in our consultancy work. For best results, remember to interpret the guideline in context — this requires a bit more thought but ensures you will get a lot more from your review. You can also download the guidelines as an Excel workbook.

Heuristic Evaluation with Morae

Every usability professional knows that Morae is a useful tool for running a software or web usability test. But did you know you could also use it to dramatically speed up the time it takes to do a heuristic evaluation? This 'How do I…' article gives you step-by-step instructions on how to carry out an expert review with Morae, complete with explanatory screen shots.

The A-Z of Usability

Rather than create yet another definition of usability, we decided to take a different approach and work through the alphabet, picking one word for each letter to capture the flavour of the field. So we proudly present the A-Z of usability — or usability in 26 words.

Heuristic Evaluation and its alternatives

The concept of heuristics has a long history, spanning the fields of philosophy, law, psychology, and human-computer interaction among others. This article provides an introduction to the use of Heuristic Evaluation in HCI.

Usability Expert Reviews: Beyond Heuristic Evaluation

Most people that carry out usability expert reviews use Jakob Nielsen's ten usability 'heuristics'. Many of these guidelines are common sense but they are not based on substantive research. The International usability standard, BS EN-ISO 9241-110 proposes an alternative set of seven guidelines. These guidelines have the benefit of international consensus and they can be applied to any interactive system.

Discount usability: time to push back the pendulum?

Discount usability techniques are a great way to eradicate usability problems. But they can never answer the question, "How usable is this system?" We blow the dust off some techniques commonly used in the early days of usability testing to see if they can provide an answer.