You are strongly encouraged to work in a team of two to four people, but individual completion of this assignment is allowed. In any case, you will be assigned an interactive web application to evaluate. The assignment is partially based on your preference. Candidates for evaluation include:
It is important that team members individually perform the heuristic evaluation before discussing the usability of the application as a group. Use the guidelines presented in class. We will go over the heuristic evaluation and this table in class.
If working as a team, discuss your individual findings as a team and consolidate them by removing redundant findings. With discussion, you may decide to omit or alter additional items from the consolidated list. For reporting your findings, you may present a guideline-by-guideline summary but also consider an organization that would be particularly useful to anyone that might need to respond to your findings (e.g. designer, developer, manager).
Identify two appropriate tasks for analysis. Perform a cognitive walkthrough on each task. We will cover the cognitive walkthrough in class. I recommend that you perform each analysis in subgroups of two to three (one task per subgroup), but you should discuss a common report formatting before formalizing your results. While it is important to keep your information short and concise, make sure you answer and document the four questions for each user action. Good, thoughtful answers discuss the user's knowledge and relate it to the interface and the needed action. Simply responding "yes" or "no" to each question is not adequate!
Based on your evaluations, prepare a list of at least three recommendations concerning the design of the interface. In some cases, for applications producing a good evaluation, you may decide against any recommendations. In these cases, you should still discuss possible changes and why your group decided against them. Order your list from most important to least important.
Submit your assignment using the course online (COL) web site. PDF is my preferred format, but I will accept any commonly available format (e.g. Word, HTML). The report should include the following:
Notes from the individual heuristic evaluations can be placed in the appendix. They are not considered part of the report and can be informally formatted.
Generally, any project that closely adheres to the above instructions will receive at least 16 (out of 20) points. Projects that are thoughtful, well-edited, systematic and concise will generally receive 18 or 19 points. A truly outstanding report will receive 20 points. Note that a long report is not necessarily a good report!
I will use this grading sheet to help me review the project.