Perform a heuristic evaluation on a suitable website of your choice. The website should facilitate a meaningful number of tasks for users, e.g. ecommerce, paying bills, playing games. This evaluation will require you to make and record observations, in order to report on them and your suggestions for improvements.
- Doing the Heuristic Evaluation
Once you have done all the preparation steps you are ready to evaluate. It is a good idea to run through the tasks twice. First, run through each task so you can familiarize yourself with the interface and tasks. In the second run-through of each task, use the heuristics to look for problems. Use the task list and heuristics checklist you developed, and a datasheet. The recommendations section of the datasheet is for brief notes as to what would fix the issue and should be expanded on later in your report.
You will need to use a datasheet, which should follow this format.
- Reporting
Your report should be oriented towards a manager that would make the major decisions on the interface and system changes. This means you will need to consider an audience who is less technically capable than you. Here is a template for you to follow. You should have six (6) pages double-spaced including screenshots (remember to caption them following APA format!); this does not include the appendices.
Executive Summary: A summary of the key problems of the system and some recommendations for improvement.
Section 1. Scenario: Give a very brief reminder (overview) on what the interface is and then explain the role (and objective) of your product evaluation team.
Section 2. Methodology: Explain what you did. Assume that your client knows what usability methods are and their purpose. Describe the five tasks you chose and the heuristics you ended up using (in case not all applied). You must provide a list of the five tasks that you chose, and explain why you’ve included them.
Section 3: Results & Interpretation: Summarize the findings of heuristic evaluation. Present findings in order of priority based on expert consensus and severity ratings. Identify common and important problems of the system. This should be more than a list of all the heuristics broken. Try to generalize problems that are related, and use examples to highlight them. Include annotated screenshots where appropriate; the annotations could include circling or otherwise drawing attention to the problem area.
Section 4: Suggested improvements: Describe five important changes that you would make to the design of the system, with an explanation. Refer back to your heuristic evaluation summary results, the discussion on web design as covered in the text and your professional experience. Remember, changes should be meaningfully related to user experience (workflow etc) rather than minor aesthetic issues.