S8080 Blog

Sometimes you see a link and you are dead sure you know what information you’ll see when you click on it – other links you just haven’t got a clue. When you are searching for information and have a specific goal the extent to which you can predict what you will find if you follow a certain path and links through a site is called the ‘Information Scent’.

‘Information scent’ is part of the information foraging theory which uses the analogy of animals hunting for food to ex plain how users interact with a web site.

In the same way that a hunting animal is sure that that following a stronger and stronger scent will mean that they find their prey at the end. Your visitor clicking through your site searching for specific information or with a specific goal will continue to do so if the information scent is getting stronger and they keep on finding links which take them closer to their goal.

This is why it’s important that the navigation is clearly defined, labels state what they will find, that the language is plain and easy to understand, and why its great to add trigger words as cues within your links – all to make that information scent particularly smelly!

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]

Sources

1. http:www.usability.gov/methods/heuristiceval.html#whatis
2. Jakob Nielsen, Ten Usability Heuristics: http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html
3. Shneiderman’s Rules for Design:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shneiderman%27s_rules_for_design
4. Usability.gov, Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
5. http://usability.gov/methods/heuristiceval.html#advan
6. http://usability.gov/methods/heuristiceval.html#how