Heuristic Evaluation of User Interfaces
CHI 90 Procee&qs
April 1990
HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Jukob Nielsen
Technical University of Denmark Department of Computer Science DK-2800 Lyngby Copenhagen Denmark dat JN@NEUVMl . bitnet
OF USER INTERFACES and Rolf Molich
B altica A/S Mail Code B22 Klausdalsbrovej 601 DK-2750 Ballerup Denmark
ABSTRACT
ical or formal evaluation methods. In real life, most user interface evaluations are heuristic evaluations but almost nothing is known about this kind of evaluation since it has been seen as inferior by most researchers. We believe, however, that a good strategy for improving usability in most industrial situations is to study those usability methods which are likely to see practical use [Nielsen 19891. Therefore we have conducted the series of experiments on heuristic evaluation reported in this paper.
HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Heuristic evaluation is an informal method of usability analysis where a number of evaluators are presented with an interface design and asked to comment on it. Four experiments showed that individual evaluators were mostly quite bad at doing such heuristic evaluations and that they only found between 20 and 51% of the usability problems in the interfaces they evaluated. On the other hand, we could aggregate the evaluations from several evaluators to a single evaluation and such aggregates do rather well, even when they consist of only three to five people. KEYWORDS: Usability evaluation, early evaluation, usability engineering, practical methods.
INTRODUCTION
As mentioned in the introduction, heuristic evaluation is done by looking at an interface and trying to come up with
There are basically four ways to evaluate a user interface: Formally by some analysis technique, automatically by a computerized procedure, empirically by experiments with teat users, and heuristically by simply looking at the interface and passing judgement according to ones own opinion. Formal analysis models are currently the object of extensive
April 1990
HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Jukob Nielsen
Technical University of Denmark Department of Computer Science DK-2800 Lyngby Copenhagen Denmark dat JN@NEUVMl . bitnet
OF USER INTERFACES and Rolf Molich
B altica A/S Mail Code B22 Klausdalsbrovej 601 DK-2750 Ballerup Denmark
ABSTRACT
ical or formal evaluation methods. In real life, most user interface evaluations are heuristic evaluations but almost nothing is known about this kind of evaluation since it has been seen as inferior by most researchers. We believe, however, that a good strategy for improving usability in most industrial situations is to study those usability methods which are likely to see practical use [Nielsen 19891. Therefore we have conducted the series of experiments on heuristic evaluation reported in this paper.
HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Heuristic evaluation is an informal method of usability analysis where a number of evaluators are presented with an interface design and asked to comment on it. Four experiments showed that individual evaluators were mostly quite bad at doing such heuristic evaluations and that they only found between 20 and 51% of the usability problems in the interfaces they evaluated. On the other hand, we could aggregate the evaluations from several evaluators to a single evaluation and such aggregates do rather well, even when they consist of only three to five people. KEYWORDS: Usability evaluation, early evaluation, usability engineering, practical methods.
INTRODUCTION
As mentioned in the introduction, heuristic evaluation is done by looking at an interface and trying to come up with
There are basically four ways to evaluate a user interface: Formally by some analysis technique, automatically by a computerized procedure, empirically by experiments with teat users, and heuristically by simply looking at the interface and passing judgement according to ones own opinion. Formal analysis models are currently the object of extensive