August 27, 2010
Evaluation by Experts: Heuristics, Guidelines, Walkthroughs
Heuristics
Heuristic Evaluation from the Usability Body of Knowledge
What You Really Get From a Heuristic Evaluation, Dana Chisnell, UX Magazine, 2010
Jakob Nielsen’s 10 heuristics, http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html. These are the classics everyone immediately thinks of when you talk about heuristics.
Mozilla heuristics: Quantifying Usability, Alex Faaborg in UX Magazine:
These are the UX principles currently being used by developers working onFirefox and other projects in the Mozilla community. We are currently utilizing Bugzilla’s keyword functionality, similar to how current bugs can be flagged as violating implementation level heuristics, like data loss. These principles can be added to any bug tracking that allows bugs to be tagged.
Guidelines
Guidelines are used like checklists as, well, guidelines for design. They can be used for evaluation by assessing a product against relevant guidelines. The best approach is to find or develop guidelines specific to a product domain; the more specific the better.
Guidelines can be developed by looking at good examples — for example, e-commerce guidelines could be developed by examining sites like Amazon.
Sample Guidelines
Apple’s iPad User Experience Guidelines
UX Magazine’s summary of iPad User Experience Guidelines
Blackberry Smartphones UI Guidelines
Susan Weinschenk, The Psychologist’s View of UX Design, UX Magazine May 19th 2010. Not intended as guidelines, but they work.
Usability.gov research-baseed guidelines for web design.
Good: these are based on large-scale research projects. A PDF manual of the guidelines can be downloaded from this site. Each guideline is evaluated for how well it is supported by research data; can be highly valuable for convincing clients of their legitimacy.
Not so good: the manual violates what I consider the most basic guideline for such material: no date! Most recent material referenced: 2006.
Web Accessibility Initiative (added 9/6/10)
Guidelines for various kinds of content, tools, and applications
Walkthroughs
Pluralistic Usability Walkthroughs
Filed by Nancy Van House at 10:01 am under accessibility,Guidelines,heuristics,Methods,Readings
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