Heuristic evaluation

Providing Sense of Purpose. Planning is more than just a heuristic evaluation function that measures complexity. The ultimate goal of synthesis is to prepare the complex from things simple. Thus... 

Analytic evaluation methods can be used early in the development process, well before there are users or prototypes available for empirical tests. Furthermore, it is often less expensive than making studies with users. Examples of analytic methods are heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthroughs, usability-expert reviews, group design reviews [864, 1025]. A hazard of analytic evaluation is that system developers or software designers may feel that they are being evaluated [941]. 

Expert evaluation (e.g., design walk-throughs heuristic evaluations)... 

There are advantages and disadvantages to each of these evaluative techniques (see Table 8) (Preece 1993, Karat 1997). Thus, a combination of methods is often used in practice. Typically, one would first perform an expert evaluation (e.g., heuristic evaluation) of a system to identify the most obvious usability problems. Then user testing could be conducted to identify remaining problems that were missed in the first stages of evaluation. In general, a number of factors need to be considered when selecting a usability-evaluation technique or a combination thereof (see Table 9) (Dix et al. 1993 Nielsen 1993 Preece 1993). 

Expert review and heuristic evaluation has a number of limitations. Eor example ... 

Heuristic Evaluation was used as a first step to evaluate the usability of three IV pumps for the Calgary Health Region. According to Nielsen (2003), three to five evaluators provide the best cost-benefit tradeoff. We chose to have five evaluators inspect each pump independently. Evaluators judged the human factors compliance of each pump with a set of human factors design guidelines. These guidelines included ... 

We also propose a new usability and security inspection method called Security Usability Symmetry (SUS), a variant of the Heuristic Evaluation method [19]. It aims... 

According to [19], usability specialists were much better than those without usability expertise at finding usability problems by heuristic evaluation. Moreover, usability specialists with specific expertise (e.g., security) did much better than regular usability specialists without such expertise, especially with regard to certain usability problems that were unique to that kind of interface. Thus, SUS is developed as a security usability inspection method for evaluators who have knowledge of usability AND also computer security. In SUS, a solely usability specialist can also work in pair with a solely security specialist. 

Nielsen, J. Finding Usability Problems through Heuristic Evaluation. In the Proceedings of ACM Computer Human Interaction (CHI 92), Monterey, CA (US), May 3-7, 1992... 

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