Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
e-commerce. The ability for the user to get information easily and quickly is
cornerstone to the scientific principles and theories surrounding the area.
One pioneer in the area of usability is Jakob Nielson. Nielson's work deals with
research and testing on usability and interface design, particularly on the World
Wide Web.
Nielson reports on his usability Web site useit.com that the study of heuristics
is on the rise. He cites over 14,000 hits on Google pointing to heuristic
evaluation. If you are wondering, heuristic evaluation is defined by Jakob
Nielson on his Web site, http://www.useit.com, as:
“Heuristic evaluation is the most popular of the usability
inspection methods. Heuristic evaluation is done as a systematic
inspection of a user interface design for usability. The goal of
heuristic evaluation is to find the usability problems in the
design so that they can be attended to as part of an iterative
design process. Heuristic evaluation involves having a small set
of evaluators examine the interface and judge its compliance
with recognized usability principles (the 'heuristics').”
The work presented in the following by Nielsen and Molich has value on the
system level as well as on designer and developer levels. The designer lacks
usability foresight in many cases and needs to go back to grass roots usability
design on paper. Creating flowcharts and storyboards, the designer fights their
way back to usability standards and the brink of digital design insanity. If the
designer had only followed the heuristic scale, the workload would be
shortened immensely.
The heuristics that Nielson refers to on his useit.com site are explained in this
list of ten heuristics for heuristic evaluation developed by Nielsen and Molich:
•
Visibility of system status
The system should always keep users informed about what is going on,
through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
•
Match between system and the real world
The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and
concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow
