Monday, 18 July 2016, 09:00 - 12:30

Everett McKay (short bio)
Principal, UX Design Edge, United States

Objectives:

To make heuristic design evaluation more relevant to modern software.

Content and Benefits:

Heuristic evaluation is a well-known technique that evaluates a design based on its compliance with recognized usability principles. Heuristic evaluations have the benefit of being very efficient and focused (for example, an accessibility evaluation is focused on accessibility problems.) However, most practitioners prefer user-based testing because they have more confidence in the results. Ideally, teams should use both, as effective heuristic evaluations make user-based testing more productive by focusing on hard-to-find problems.

But a heuristic evaluation is only as good as the set of heuristics used, and the most popular heuristics are well past their “best by” dates. Arguably the most popular usability heuristics were devised by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich—in 1990! Considering how rapidly UI design has changed, the relevance and practical value of even 5-year-old heuristics should be suspect. Less popular heuristics are often vague and hard to apply meaningfully (example: “…check whether the user has enough control…” What does that even mean?)

This tutorial will consist of two parts. In Part 1, we will quickly review the most well known usability heuristics, plus a summary of the top design principles recommended by the most popular platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac). The class will break into three teams (representing desktop, web, and mobile), and devise their own usability heuristics using a structured process. The focus of the results will be on their practical value. At the end of this part, each team will present their results to the class.

For Part 2, we will review the ground rules for effective heuristic evaluations, then as apply our newly created heuristics to desktop, web, and mobile designs (at least one for each platform). The tutorial will end with a discussion about the effectiveness of the evaluations and how to further improve the process.

Target audience:

Anyone who wants to improve their design skills, give better design feedback, or conduct more effective heuristic evaluations.

Links

Web: http://www.uxdesignedge.com
Twitter: @uxdesignedge
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/UxDesignEdge/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/everettmckay

Bio Sketch of Presenter:

Everett McKay is Principal of UX Design Edge, a user experience design training and consulting company for mobile, web, and desktop applications. He has been teaching UX design to software professionals since 2003 and has delivered design workshops to an international audience that includes Europe (UK, Ireland, Poland, Greece, Turkey), Asia (India, China), South Africa, and South America (Argentina).

Everett is author of "UI is Communication: How to design intuitive, user-centered user interfaces by focusing on effective communication", published by Morgan Kaufmann. While at Microsoft, he was responsible for writing and evangelizing the Windows User Experience Guidelines.