The Heuristic Evaluation and User Testing

Chapter I

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND

Since the heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough, the first two usability engineering methods, were formally presented at the Computer-Human Interactions 1990 Conference, usability inspection methods have seen explosive growth. Only after four years since the presentation of the earliest research papers, usability inspection methods have been embraced by the practitioners in this field. The major reasons that supported this fast transfer, as Jakob Nielsen (1994) summarized, include:

• Many companies realized the urgent need for increased usability activities to improve their user interfaces. If the product is easy to use, companies will save money on fixing problems, handling support calls and product training. What’s more, the companies will not lose customers because of an unhappy experience with the product.

• Usability inspection methods are easy to learn, implement and cheap to use.

• They provide instant results, with a list of usability problems available immediately after the inspection and further, providing concrete evidence about the interface that need to be improved.

While at the same time, usability experts are also aware of where and why inspection methods fall short. Brooks (1994) pointed out that inspection methods are not as good as user testing for understanding the users’ trade-off between matrix – which dimensions ( for example, speed or accuracy, categorizing option or seeing all alternatives) are most important to users in their particular environment. The results from inspection evaluation methods can not provide an opinion about how users will react to the total interface or how acceptable the interface is relative to competitor’s interface. Studies have shown that usability inspections and user testing sometimes represent distinct sets of problems. The practitioners should be made aware of what the strengths and weaknesses are because they often face...