This week we looked at Heuristic Evaluation which was something new I had not heard of before as well as Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design.
The Nielsen Norman Group says “A heuristic evaluation is a method for identifying design problems in a user interface. Evaluators judge the design against a set of guidelines that make systems easy to use”. It is a way to find areas of a digital product which are causing problems for users.
When you do not have a UX team, you must conduct one yourself, this is called a UX audit. An auditor uses a range of methods and tools to analyse where a product is going wrong such as:
Once this has been established, the evaluator will then assign a “severity rating” to each of the usability issues identified. UX designers will work their way down from the most critical issues to the least critical.
A Heuristic Evaluation can be performed at any stage during the design process. ****However, conducting one at the very beginning means you get feedback early on. Other times you could conduct one are when you are brought in to evaluate an existing system that has not undergone previous UX evaluation and iterative design or when you cannot afford or don’t have time to do testing but still want to do some evaluation
These are Nielsen’s Usability Heursitics for Interaction Design. They are called "heuristics" because they are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines.
Visibility of System Status
The design should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time. An example of this would be when you upload a file, it tells you how much time is left and displays a countdown timer that depicts it visually and once it has finished, the user is provided the feedback of a green checkmark.
Match between System & Real World