This post is part of the ongoing series of reading reflections on HCI papers and articles. You can find the other posts ‘here.’
Heuristic Evaluation of the User Interfaces
Digital Object Identifier (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1145/97243.97281
The authors conclude after multiple experiments that regardless of the effectiveness or expertise of the usability expert, there is no correlation with the severity of usability issues found by the expert. The authors are therefore in favor of evaluations of the User Interface by a team of experts individually and consolidating their findings.
Therefore, I think that it is important that the evaluation of mockups/design sketches/prototypes is done by all members of the team for the FP deliverables, to capitalize on the team’s diverse backgrounds and experiences, to identify and mitigate potential usability issues early on, and to ensure that the final product is as usable as possible.
Per the heuristics proposed by this paper, I think that design teams should come up with a style guide, and branding that is consistent, with clear and consistent visual language. This will help users to understand the product and its features more easily and will help to make the product more usable. The product should also use language that is familiar to the user and should be consistent in its use of language. And all of these tasks should be done as early as possible in the design process, to have enough time for iterative improvements.
As for evaluating the cognitive load on the user, I think a great method is to have representative users give a walkthrough of the product and ask them to explain what they are doing and why they are doing it. This will help to identify tasks the user is struggling with and will help the design team come up with better metaphors or add more visual cues to help the user understand the product better.