Day 17: Setup a Heuristic Evaluation Program
In our 31 Days to improve your IWMS Implementation Challenge, the user-friendliness of the interfaces of the IWMS has been covered in several posts. The methodologies used to measure the usability of an application however, did not include heuristic evaluation.
The heuristic evaluation method is developed by Jakob Nielsen on the basis of several years of experience in teaching and consulting about usability engineering. The heuristic evaluation method aims at identifying usability problems in the user-interface of interactive websites, intranets or applications.
In today’s teaching and post you are going to learn more about the heuristic evaluation method, and how to setup a heuristic evaluation program for your IWMS.
Today’s teaching
Heuristic evaluation is a discount usability engineering method for quick, cheap, and easy evaluation of a user interface design.
Heuristic evaluation is the most popular of the usability inspection methods. Heuristic evaluation is done as a systematic inspection of a user interface design for usability. The goal of heuristic evaluation is to find the usability problems in the 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”). (Source: Useit.com)
Additional material
Jakob Nielsen has published quite a few articles about heuristic evaluation, but the most important are:
- Heuristic Evaluation
- How to conduct a heuristic evaluation
- A more detailed discussion of the characteristics of the usability problems found by heuristic evaluation
- How to rate the severity of the usability problems
These articles are the basis of the program you are going to setup for your Integrated Workplace Management System. I specifically write program, as your IWMS is never completely finished. Every day new functionality, new interfaces, new workflows etc. need to be evaluated before it will be applied in the production environment. The heuristic evaluation method is a low cost, high efficiency method for identifying user-interface design problems.
Nielsen’s Heuristics for Usability Testing
These are ten general principles for user interface design. They are called “heuristics” because they are more in the nature of rules of thumb than specific usability guidelines.
Visibility of system status
The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
Match between system and the real world
The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
User control and freedom
Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
Consistency and standards
Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.
Error prevention
Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
Recognition rather than recall
Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
Flexibility and efficiency of use
Accelerators — unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
Aesthetic and minimalist design
Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
Help and documentation
Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.
How to conduct a heuristic IWMS evaluation
1. Plan your evaluation
You should evaluate on a regular basis, but heuristic evaluation can be particularly useful when you want to introduce a new module or extensions of modules / interfaces for your IWMS. You can use heuristic evaluations for all changes as defined by your Quality Assurance Organization, but this can take a significant amount of time.
Although there are more types of evaluation I would recommend letting your evaluators carry out a set of predefined tasks.
2. Select the evaluators
One of the key benefits of the Heuristic Evaluation method is the cost-benefit ratio. Since you only need 5 evaluators to identify 75% of all user-interface problems, Heuristic Evaluation can help your organization to improve your IWMS as well.
But,..
Although most software vendors have usability experts onboard, your organization probably has not. Therefore you need to either train internal Quality Assurance employees to perform evaluation tasks, or hire external usability experts. These external software usability experts should be able to identify approximately 90% of the issues. If you don’t train your employees they will identify about 20% of all usability issues.
3. Review the heuristics
Ensure that you instruct each evaluator what task he has to complete and to what heuristic the evaluator has to evaluate the IWMS against. The heuristics can be found above.
4. Conduct the evaluation
There are a couple of guidelines when conducting the actual evaluation:
To minimize biased results, the evaluation has to be done independently. Preferably at the same time evaluators need to complete the set of tasks you have instructed them to evaluate. Ensure that the evaluators try to complete tasks that are absolutely relevant for the correct usage of the IWMS. I would suggest focusing on module critical functionality.
In addition to that, keeping the minimalist heuristic in mind, everything which is not absolutely necessary for completing the task needs to be removed from the layout.
5. Analyze the results
The most important part of the analysis is to aggregate the results of the individual evaluators. If you aggregate the problems patterns and design flaws become immediately obvious.
After the analysis you should create a report with the results and review these results with your Quality Assurance Manager (QAM).
Today’s task
The first project phase is live now and if all went well, you have created a next steps project plan. In most cases the project plan will contain next modules to be implemented.
Your task today is to:
- Read the information about Heuristic Evaluation
- Identify Evaluators in your organization
- Select the first module to be implemented in phase 2
- Organize a heuristic evaluation for this module
