Assignment 1:
Performing and Reporting Heuristic Evaluations

Due Date: TBD

Introduction

For this assignment, you will perform a heuristic evaluation on two websites (to be determined) and in doing so, develop practical usability skills that can be applied in future work situations. You will also develop skills in reporting your results in a professional and useful manner. Your evaluation will be made available to the authors of the websites and will provide value in shaping the usability of their sites. For this assignment you will be working pairs.

Method

Jacob Nielsen (from How to conduct a heuristic evaluation) describes heuristic evaluation as follows:

"Heuristic evaluation (Nielsen and Molich, 1990; Nielsen 1994) is a usability engineering method for finding the usability problems in a user interface design so that they can be attended to as part of an iterative design process. Heuristic evaluation involves having a small set of evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance with recognized usability principles (the "heuristics")."

Your goal is to evaluate the usability of the two websites and present your findings in a report and two 15 minute PowerPoint presentation (a select few of you may be asked to give a presentation). Instruction for performing a heuristic evaluation can be found at http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_evaluation.html. Please note, you will be one of many doing this evaluation. The composite results from all evaluations will be used to understand and improve the usability of the websites. All results will be forwarded to the websites' owners.

Usability Report and Presentation

Your final report will consist of two primary elements:

1. Usability results (short description of mandate, what was done, and a pithy prioritized and to the point description of the results, i.e., something that will be read and acted upon). Please include both positive and negative results.
2. Usability presentation (15 minutes worth of PPT slides for each evaluation: ~ 10 slides); reports frequently get shelved and go unread. This may be the only way you can get the attention of management and the developers.

The report should be well written, grammatically correct, and use correct spelling. Please include a cover page (Title, Date, Course, Name (s), but no student ID) and an executive summary. The one page executive summary is not a table of contents, but an aid for anyone interested in finding out what is in your document without having to read the full document. It is meant for busy people who want to find out whether they should read your document (or not) and should highlight the most important aspects of the document. Draw the reader in. The results must be presented in an easy to use manner that presents them in a logical and useful way. A PDF must be emailed to me and the TA by the due date. Failure to do so will reduce your mark.