A new usability heuristic evaluation checklist
My attempt to improve the usability checklist
The product design has moved from traditional legacy applications to the web, mobile, AR, and VR technologies. But when you consider how the usability aspects moved from legacy applications to web and mobile, it seems that it carries out some core values. The term usability came a long way since it’s powerful impact after Don Norman’s book called Design of everyday things. It is sad to see that the designers in the modern era focus on Esthetically usability effect than improving the usability of the product.
What is usability?
The usability refers to the ease of access or use of a website or product. In the ISO terms of usability, it says that the usability is the extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use.
What can we gain from improving usability in applications?
In usability engineering, Jakob Nielsen talks about five qualities of a usable product.
Learnability: The application is not complex so the user doesn’t have to put an extra effort to understand what the product is about and how to work with it to achieve a goal. The application should tell a story to reveal itself.
Effectiveness: The completeness and accuracy with which users achieve their goals.
Efficient: The speed and accuracy with which this work can be done.
Engaging: How pleasant, satisfying or interesting an application is to use.
Forgiving: The design allows the users to recover from errors and prevent errors by error detection and correction.
Engaging: How pleasant, satisfying or interesting an application is to use.
How to achieve the usability in a product?
Achieving the delight for the users when interacting with the application is not simple. The ten usability heuristics will help the designers to make the application intuitive.
What are the 10 usability heuristics?
Visibility of system status: The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time.
Match between system and the real world: The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms.
User control and freedom: Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
Consistency and standards: Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing.
Error prevention: Eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
Recognition rather than recall: Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
Flexibility and efficiency of use: The design should be easier to use for all the user groups. Even though we have only one set of a user group, then there would be novice users and experienced ones.
Aesthetic and minimalist design: Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
Help and documentation: Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.
The Heuristic Evaluation checklist
The Heuristic evaluation is the common way of seeing whether the product is usable or not. Conducting usability heuristic evaluations of existing products will reveal why the user engagement is less. Performing heuristic evaluation is a really good practice to keep a consistent, engaging product. The biggest problem of the current checklist for the Heuristic Evaluation is that it is created focusing legacy applications and it is a little outdated. New technologies come to the podium every day. The designers have to adapt to them and make intuitive designs. I modified the existing heuristic evaluation checklist a little so we can use it in the latest technologies. I will add the link to the checklist down below. I would be very much thankful if you can have a look and give me feedback on it.
If you find it interesting please feel free to contact me via facebook or Gmail. I will be more than happy to send you the Excel file to you.
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