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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.
With a usability expert review, an evaluator uses a product or web site and assesses its usability against a set of principles or best practice guidelines. Expert reviews are popular because they are much quicker and cheaper to carry out than a usability test.
Most usability evaluators use the set of heuristics developed 17 years ago by Rolf Molich and Jakob Nielsen. Before this work, lots of people had derived guidelines and principles for usability but there were often so many guidelines that an expert review could take many days to complete. (For example, Smith and Mosier's Guidelines For Designing User Interface Software has 944 guidelines and remains the largest collection of publicly available user interface guidelines in existence.)
Molich and Nielsen's ten guidelines are as follows.
But what Mohlich and Nielsen's guidelines gained in brevity they lost in accuracy. Smith and Mosier's guidelines were reviewed by dozens of professionals and based on scores of research papers. Mohlich and Nielsen's guidelines were derived from a database of 249 usability problems from evaluations of 11 interactive systems. As Bob Bailey has pointed out:
“These heuristics, which are widely used, have never been validated. There is no evidence that by applying these heuristics in the design and development of user interfaces that it will improve the interface.”
What alternatives exist? Most usability professionals have their own favourite sets of guidelines or checklists but these suffer from the same problem: they are not research-based but are often a matter of opinion. As a consequence, they are subject to the biases and whims of the reviewer. What we need is a set of guidelines that are based on research and have some international consensus.
International standards meet these criteria. BS EN-ISO 9241-110: Ergonomics of human system interaction - Part 110: Dialogue principles, contains a set of alternative heuristics. These heuristics are based on research and have the benefit of international consensus. The principles, and their definition in the standard, are as follows:
In our experience, developers are more likely to fix an issue with a user interface when we point to an international standard than when we base our judgement on personal opinion. So next time you're reviewing a user interface, try out these seven guidelines. They may not be as well known, but they do have the authority and credibility of an international standard.
Dr. David Travis (@userfocus) has been carrying out ethnographic field research and running product usability tests since 1989. He has published three books on user experience including Think Like a UX Researcher. If you like his articles, you might enjoy his free online user experience course.
Gain hands-on practice in all the key areas of UX while you prepare for the BCS Foundation Certificate in User Experience. More details
This white paper describes each of the many parts of ISO 9241 in detail. Now available for viewing on-line and off-line (in pdf and epub format). ISO 9241 for Beginners.
This article is tagged expert review, heuristic evaluation, ISO 9241, standards.
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