Heuristic Evaluation

Summary: Conduct a heuristic evaluation of your project site.

Collaboration: Each group will submit one spreadsheet. You may discuss the evaluation with anyone you like.

Resources: In addition to the paper by Levi and Conrad (1996), Jakob Nielsen's site on heuristic evaluation and our textbook provide some more detailed guidance. As always, you can also ask me questions.

Due: Friday, April 4, 5 p.m.

Assignment

1. Find the tasks you proposed for usability testing of your project site.
2. Using these tasks as guidance, each team member should independently explore the site and make notes about any heuristic violations you see. 
• Use the revised heuristics from Levi and Conrad (1996, p. 58). 
• List the violations in a spreadsheet. Include a description of the project and which heuristic is violated.
3. Meet as a team to combine each member's notes into a single spreadsheet where each violation is listed only once. Make sure each team member understands what each violation is. (You will have some time on Thursday, April 3.)
4. Each team member should independently rank the severity of each violation using the severity rating scale from Levi and Conrad (1996, p. 55).
5. Add a column to the spreadsheet for severity ratings for each team member. Also compute an average severity rating.

Turning in your work

Assessment

You will earn 10 points for turning in the heuristic evaluation spreadsheet on time.

Janet Davis (davisjan@cs.grinnell.edu)