Heuristic Evaluation Usability Testing
Heuristic Evaluation (one-on-one)
A heuristic evaluation is one of the more popular methods of usability testing and takes place with a functional website, likely in the last stages of development or right before a redesign. This is the type of lab setting that we showed you in Monday’s tip How to Conduct a Usability Lab, and requires a computer with a webcam and usability software like Morae, a moderator, and a user.
In this usability test, you are required to come up with 5-10 major tasks such as:
- Subscribe to the email newsletter
- Download a free report
- Subscribe to the RSS feed
- Purchase a book
- Unsubscribe from email list
The user is then recorded via webcam and the usability software while being timed performing each task. You will want to set a time limit for each task, from 60 seconds to three minutes. In general, if a user takes three minutes to find and subscribe to an email newsletter, the site has failed this task. Come up with a scorecard to document these times and scores.
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June 18th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
I’m a newbie but I’m very interested in heuristic techniques. Thanks for posting this.