Heuristic Evaluation / Usability Testing

HCID 531 Evaluation Studio | Week 8

Related to our capstone project, for this week’s assignment we did an heuristic evaluation and usability testing session on Expedia.

We found that Jakob Nielson’s Heuristic Evaluation was not entirely fitting the whole scenario of Expedia, so after 5 of us did our own evaluation, we decided to add 2 more attributes on the list.

So we designed our usability testing session based on our heuristic evaluation, and it turned out the new functionality “Scratchpad”, even with great purpose and approach, was far from well designed. We focused on this functionality, and brought in 2 participants to see how they accomplish the tasks through current release.

The takeaway from this was that we figured out we should be really careful on designing the script of testing, since the session of first participant was a little bumpy, and after iterating once the second one definitely got smoother. Regarding limited time, we did not engage a test run, which we should have done.