In-Store Heuristics Evaluation
Heuristic Evaluation Practice, HCID 531 User Research Studio
Background
This week, we learned heuristics evaluation, and aimed to evaluate an existing product, related to our capstone project. As our capstone project focuses on the future of retail, and specifically, the in-store shopping experience, we decided to evaluate the gift registry system, which consists of a hand-held scanner and a in-store kiosk in Crate & Barrel — a home furniture store located in university village, Seattle.
Heuristics Evaluation
First of all, we created a set of tasks (create profile, build a registry, review what’s been registered or purchased, and update/make changes to products), to help us conduct the heuristics evaluation in a more structured and efficient way. Then, we each used the Ten Usability Heuristics to independently evaluate the system and rate the severity of each issue.
After finished with all evaluations, we created a master list of all of our issues, individually rated their severity, and averaged our ratings. Though it was our first time to conduct heuristics evaluation, and even in real world, we really did a very good job. It was very surprised to see how many usability issues we found through the process. Heuristics Evaluation is a very effificent method to uncover main usability issues.
We also conducted in-store usability testing, I will explain more in the next blog.
Reflection
Actually, I was a bit confused by two ways to conduct heuristics evaluation: one is to check each heuristic on each step or task, to find out whether the usability fits the heuristic principles; the other is to find out the usability problem first, and then to check which heuristic it belongs to. From our own expericence, the latter is the general way.
For one thing, the people who conduct heuristics evaluation must be usability experts, they are very knowledgeable and experienced either in usability or heuristics evaluation. In my view, the heuristics are used to help experts better organize and prioritize usability issues, and better express and share the evaluation findings and results to other team members. For another, Nielsen Norman’s ten usability heuristics is mainly used for website usability, there are also a tons of heuristics focus on different products, and services.
In addition, I felt that the debrief session was also not that easy and of great importance as well. How to find out a good way to collect all the issues, and organize and prioritize them should be well considered.
