Expert Evaluation: Heuristics, Guidelines, Walk-Throughs, Competitor Analysis
Competitor Analysis
Easy to explain, harder to do, and usually a critical first step. There are lots of discussions and examples online — what’s key is (1) who you define your competitors to be and (2) the criteria that you use.
Kuniavsky ch. 13
Heuristics
Everyone knows about heuristics, few use these anymore. But you need to know them.
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 also 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 or application; the more specific the better. Some organizations have their own guidelines to ensure consistency across their products and services.
Guidelines can be developed by looking at good examples — for example, e-commerce guidelines could be developed by examining sites like Amazon. “Good” may simply mean what many people are used to, such as Amazon or Facebook.
Sample Guidelines
Apple’s iPad User Experience Guidelines
UX Magazine’s summary of iPad User Experience Guidelines
iOS Human Interface 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
Guidelines for various kinds of content, tools, and applications