S8080 Blog

The goal of heuristic evaluation is to find usability problems early in the design of a website so that improvements can be made as part of the iterative design process.

Heuristic evaluations are usually conducted by a small set (one to three) of evaluators. The evaluators independently examine a user interface and judge its compliance with a set of usability principles. The result of this analysis is a list of potential usability issues or problems. The usability principles, also referred to as usability heuristics, are taken from published lists. [1]

What is a heuristic?

An example of some high-level heuristics might be:

• Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors. [2]
  
• Design to facilitate recognition rather than recall memory. [2]
• Enable frequent users to use shortcuts. [3]

Lower-level heuristics may include:

• Clearly and prominently communicate the purpose and value of the web site on the home page. [4]
• Provide feedback to let users know where they are within a web site. [4]
• Make the link text consistent with the title or headings on the destination (i.e. target) page. [4]

What are the advantages of a heuristic review?

The method can provide some quick and relatively inexpensive feedback to designers. Feedback can be obtained early in the design process. Assigning the correct heuristic can help suggest the best corrective measures to designers. [5]

How does it differ from an expert review?

In an expert review, the heuristics are assumed to have been previously learned and internalised by the evaluators. That is to say, evaluators do not use a clear-cut set of heuristics. As a result, the expert review tends to be less formal, and usually there is no requirement to assign a specific heuristic to each potential problem. [6]

We asked all 18 members of the S8080 team three questions – New years resolution for 2009, the best thing from 2008 and their fave site (at the moment).

Some interesting stuff…

Ad

- Pass my driving test

- Discovered a cider called Cornish Rattler

- BBC Website

JamesP

- To have a fruit bowl on my desk (with some kind of real, non-mouldy fruit in it)

- Moved into a shared house, with some fairly random people

- BBC iPlayer takes my vote (more of a service, but it’s so handy and easy to use (as well as being daring enough to have a black design for a website)

Rob

- Keep on keeping on

- Robopoly – My Monopoly themed birthday booze-a-thon. It even managed to weasel itself onto Cookie’s blog

- www.failblog.org

Scott

- Cut down on the boozing and get back in the gym. If that doesn’t happen then I promise to drink more than before!

- Snow boarding in Zermatt Switzerland and making it alive to see another new year

- http://www.2advanced.com/ purely for the flash and design.

JamesB

- To quit smoking……a bit

- (Attempted) Cray-fishing expedition to Cape Point, S. Africa. As we ventured further and further out… with the waves becoming increasingly bumpy… contemplating the possible onset of nausea… and as the rain began to fall from accumulating black clouds above… the realisation set in that this was a very small boat in a very big ocean and home to the odd great white shark. I have a newfound respect for all fisherman!

- www.smashingmagazine.com

Rod

- Work, life, balance

- Learnt how to render and pebble dash an external wall! Exciting I know.

- www.smashingmagazine.com – Some amazing articles.

JamesF

- A trio of: stop biting my nails / start keeping a journal / do more creative things in my spare time (programming, writing, photography). Currently doing rubbish at the non-nail-biting, so feel free to give me a slap if you see me nibbling away

- Graduate from university. It was a lot of hard work, but worth it in the end – felt very proud of myself and my friends

- I’m not sure I can pick just one…

- Instapaper (http://www.instapaper.com) rocks for its simplicity (it also has a native iPhone app) – I have a habit of opening loads of tabs in my browser and keeping them about for ages until I get time to read them (information overload!). Instapaper helps by letting you bookmark pages to read later – you can then access them at a later date via the minimal web interface or the iPhone app. Super-simple, but works brilliantly; it’s like your own personal newspaper

- BBC iPlayer (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer) was invaluable over Crimbo to catch up on Christmas specials if I missed them when they actually aired

- I recently took out an Audible (http://www.audible.co.uk) subscription, and have been listening to their audiobooks for a couple of months now on my walks to/from work. I’m loving them, and it gets me much more value from an hour of my day where I’d usually just be walking

- And finally, a trio of sites I use every single day: Google Mail, Google Reader, and Twitter

Andy

- Don’t make any more New Year’s resolutions

- Surf in Fuerteventura with Plumby

- www.gowerlive.com

Matt

- Try a different welsh cheese every week

- Easy – holding our new born daughter for the first time

- www.boardseeker.com

Sali

- Lose weight and do more exercise, same as every year!!

- Finally tackled my jungle of a garden

- www.asos.com

Eugene

- Same resolution I make every year, Try to take over the world

- Stopped my nasty social smoking habit at last

- www.metacritic.com / Google Reader

Tim

- I like to be realist in my resolutions and not set ones that I know I will break within a matter of weeks. In line with this I am happy to vow that in the year 2009 I will not die my hair purple.

- The cycle trip I did in southwest Italy was amazing. Amazing location, great company, great weather, great food and it was healthy!

- www.thewayoutwest.co.uk – it’s brilliant

JSJ

- Eat healthy stuff, take my vitamins and avoid any more flu bugs!

- Apart from watching my beloved Swansea City winning the league at Gillingham (a long, wet but very jubilant bus journey!), I have to say getting married at the young age of 37 and joining the crazies at S8080!

- Twitter – an absolute mine of knowledge / breaking news from friends and professional web developers / designers. Micro blogging at it’s very best!

Si

- Never done them, not doing them now… never will do them!

- Doing the London Triathlon (2.31… yeah baby!!) which involved wearing all in one lycra outfits in public! Also going sub 1.30 in the Cardiff half marathon

- Still Myspace all the way. It provides me with endless supply of new music

Chris

- At least 50 ‘Chris powered’ miles a week and take more photographs

- Taught my two eldest boys to ride a bike – it got me back in the saddle. Got back into photography

- Flickr

Peter

- Not to make any resolutions

- Didn’t die (serious comment!)

- www.liveside.net (for the content)

Paul

- To stop making new years resolutions, as I never stick to them.

- Go on holiday to Majorca

- www.skysports.com

Jon

- Take my keys with me always, especially when the missus is in labour and we need to drive to the hospital. This will save me having to smash windows and panic my other kids

- The best thing I did in ‘08 was to buy the missus a new car to get her off my back, followed closely by 42 inches of LCD magic. The best thing I’ll be doing in ’09 is tuning the missus into an XBOX360 and keeping my eldest happy when she realises Fireman Sam isn’t actually at Pontins

- Best webs at the moment are smashing, Microsoft/web and Matt Berseth’s Blog. Matt’s got a great approach to programming, but his blog could do with a facelift

Google wishes Jackson Pollock a happy birthday.

Turn up the volume and watch these interactive posters in action.

Stuff I wish I had thought of from Brazilian sound production company, Saxsofunny.

Via Andy, via formfiftyfive.

I found this nice little summary of some usability rules and principles on the smashingmagazine site, it also includes a small usability glossary, worth a quick scan.

See: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/10/09/30-usability-issues-to-be-aware-of/

• To teach design to the sons and daughters of my teachers and to continue learning.
• To practice design to the best of my ability for my clients.
• Never to do deliberate harm to or annoy the audience for anyone else’s interest.
• To communicate messages worthy of the audience’s attention.
• To keep the good of the audience as the highest priority.

Via Thinking for a Living

 

The creators of this oath wanted a concise declaration, so obviously a lot of stuff has been left unsaid.

A few I would add… the first from the IWA code of ethics

• To protect the intellectual property of others by relying on our own innovation and efforts, thus ensuring that all benefits vest with its originator.

The second is inspired by NO!SPEC (against free pitching)…

• To never devalue my profession and peers by producing speculative work.

And finally, from the AGDA code of ethics…

• To work in a manner so that as little harm (direct or indirect) as possible is caused to the natural environment.

Thanks for reading.

If you are asked to use CAPS in navigation menus argue hard that you should be using mixed cases – even if it isn’t ‘on brand‘

The online guidelines are against using all caps in navigation menus, as this reduces legibility & readability by 10%. When mixing cases there is a more varied letterform which is easier to read than than the BOXY SHAPES OF ALL CAPS.

 

By Patrick Moberg

In the autumn we did a big IA project for a client and we wanted & needed to make the point that sign up for news forms should be VERY short.

The marketing data vultures always want a form longer than my leg (I’m 6ft 5″ so that’s long), so we went to a load of the bigger brands and showed them how they do it – they don’t get their users to jump through hoops to sign up they make it REALLY simple and fast to fill in a form, typically just getting the user to leave their email address.

Here’s how Nintendo do it:

The sign up form is really short, the button is descriptive and obvious and the opt ins are opt ins…

and what I really liked about Nintendo was that right next to the fill in form they tell you what you get before you sign up.

Source: http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/news/index_newsletter.jsp

 

So next time your marketing data vultures say they want a 40 field form show them how the bigger brand sites do it, and tell them that if they want to increase the number of subscribers they need to reduce the input fields to the absolute minimum.

I read a report on MarketingSherpa the other day which stated that 59% of consumer and 90% of business users view some or all of their emails with images turned off (due to preview panels having images turned off as default on some applications and mobile Internet users often having images turned off by default).

Therefore they recommend always making sure that before you send out your latest email campaign you’ve tested the email with images turned off, text descriptions appear when images are blocked and all of the links have good descriptions rather than ‘Click here’ – makes a lot of sense.

Source & full article here: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30751