Goal:

The goal of this assignment is to get experience performing a heuristic evaluation of a real user interface, and to provide useful feedback to your classmates on their interface designs.

Job:

In this assignment you and one or two other students will act as consultants to another group in the class. Assume they would like some outside assistance in finding problems with their prototype interface.

This assignment will proceed in two steps. First, each student will perform a heuristic evaluation on their own and write up a report. Second, all the students in the evaluation group will pool their lists of problems, assign severity ratings to each problem, and make summary recommendations to the project group.

Individual Evaluation:

Apply Nielsen's heuristics to the interface, making use of the project group's tasks, scenarios, UI design, screen shots, and interactive prototype. You should do this in two passes. In the first pass, read the group's reports and then try out their prototype (i.e., run it); walk through their task scenarios. In the second pass, go through the interface (using the scenarios again if appropriate) and look for and note HE violations.

You should concentrate on the interface the group has designed, not only on what has been implemented. Do not focus on features that are missing, but would clearly be added (e.g., "there should be help on this screen... and this screen..." -- if it is a globally missing feature you can report it once). We want to focus on evaluating what they have designed so far.

Use the heuristic numbering scheme from Assignment 5 and on page 414 of the textbook. Use the severity rating scheme from the March 2 lecture:

• 0. Don't think this is a usability problem.
• 1. Cosmetic problem
• 2. Minor usability problem
• 3. Major usability problem; important to fix
• 4. Usability catastrophe; imperative to fix

The indvidual report should list each of the problems found in the following format:

problem # [heuristic # and name] (severity rating)
description of problem and reasoning why you think this violates the heuristic

For example:
5. [H4 Consistency & Standards] (Severity 2)
The interface used the string "Save" on the first screen for saving the user's file, but used the string "Write file" on the second screen. Users may be confused by this different terminology for the same function.

6. [H3 User Control & Freedom] (Severity 3)
The interface brings the user into a set of preference screens when they select "New User", but doesn't allow the user out of the dialog until they fill out all 4 screens. There is no way to cancel from any of the screens if a user came into the first screen by accident.

.....

The individual evaluation writeup should take no more than two printed pages. You shouldn't spend more than 2 hours on this part of the assignment.

Group Evaluation:

The group report should compile all usability violations, eliminating duplicates. Make a note of how many evaluators found each error. Decide on the appropriate severity measure for each violation; negotiate among yourselves and use an average if you can't come to agreement. List the total number of violations in each severity category and each heuristic type.

The group report should close with some overall recommendations for improving the user interface. The group report should take no more than 6 printed pages. You shouldn't spend more than an hour and a half on this part of the assignment.

Turn in both the individual reports and the group report at the beginning of class on April 8. You will be graded on how complete your HE is in terms of coverage of the presented user interface design, clarity of your violation descriptions, and quality of your recommendations.

Two projects have only one team member, and two projects have four team members. For this reason, I have rearranged some of the groups (just for the purposes of this assignment, not for the purposes of doing your class project).

Names	Project to Evaluate
Ginsburg, Lam, & Lussier	bookstore
Chott, Sengupta, & Costa	suffragists speak
Hernandez, Liang, & Jiang	anti-spam
Brandt, Falk, & McMahon	CDL
Thomas, Lack, & Miller	holocaust survivors
Dhamija, Chen, & Figallo	webmarking
Sho & von Krogh	security interfaces
Shamma & Johnstad	airline tickets
Henke, Kada & Ray	source selection
Orr, Stetson, & Chopra	knowledge management