HCI Course Part 4 - Heuristic Evaluations

This is part four in my series about the Human-Computer Interaction course I took through Coursera. Read all my posts for the full story. 

An important part of this course is the peer review and self-evaluation process. If you take the process seriously you can learn a huge amount by evaluating the work of other students as well as your own work. Each assignment has a grading rubric to help you figure out what kind of feedback to give and how to score.

The peer review and self-evaluation process for Assignment 3 Wireframing also gave us a chance to practice a common UX technique: heuristic evaluations.

What are heuristic evaluations?

Read More

Heuristic Evaluation

One of the wonderful resources shared in Klemmer's HCI course are the articles by Nielsen Norman Group. Specifically, here are three we used to help us evaluate assignments during class. How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation discusses how to use a small set of people to examine an interface for usability issues with a list of criteria (heuristics) as an evaluation tool.

10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design presents some of the most general principles of interaction design. This list can be a good starting point for what to look for when evaluating an interface.

Severity Ratings for Usability Problems provides a way to prioritize the issues found with an interface.

Next up I'll be using these as guidelines as I search the web to find sites with usability issues.