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?

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HCI Course Part 3 - Wireframing

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

Assignment 3 Wireframing

After choosing a concrete direction (Mary Jo's Storyboard in my case) we jumped into the process of prototyping by creating two rapid interactive wireframes that varied in interface, but offered the same basic functionality.

The process of rapid prototyping involves producing your ideas quickly and testing them. Confirm if your designs work as planned. Based on what you learn from those tests make more designs and refine previous ones. Test more. Refine and adjust. Test. Repeat again. Iteration upon iteration to improve and refine the design.

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HCI Course Part 1 - Needfinding

As I mentioned previously, during April & May 2013 I participated in Scott Klemmer’s Human-Computer Interaction course from Stanford Online.

In this course, you will learn how to design technologies that bring people joy, rather than frustration. Helping you build human-centered design skills, so that you have the principles and methods to create excellent interfaces with any technology. (more)

Over a series of posts I'll share some of my coursework with you. This is the first of the series. Read them all!

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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.