Heuristic Evaluation Homework

For this homework, you will conduct a heuristic evaluation of the web site for the Volunteer Center.

Doing the Evaluation

  • You should limit your evaluation to the Volunteer Center’s “own” site, rather than the 3rd party site they use to actually handle finding and responding to opportunities. You can tell which site you are on as follows:
    • On their own site, the URL will contain “whatcomvolunteer.org”
    • On the 3rd party site, the URL will contain “galaxydigital.com”
  • Your evaluation should be guided by this set of heuristics. This set has some overlap with Nielsen’s 10 heuristics, but is designed to be more specific to a non-interactive web site.
  • Explore the web site and look for violations of the heuristics. For each violation that you find, make a note of what the issue is and where you found it in the site, and also take a screenshot that helps illustrate this issue. See if you can find at least one issue for each of the heuristics (the heuristics were selected so you should be able to do this.)

Writing your Report

  • Assume the audience is the staff of the Volunteer Center.
  • Your report should have the following structure:
    • Purpose: Explain what a heuristic evaluation is and why this is a useful thing to do (1 paragraph).
    • Heuristics: Briefly describe what heuristics were used; try to keep it to a sentence for each heuristic. A bulleted list is appropriate here.
    • Issues: Pick the 5 most serious issues you found, in terms of what you think most urgently needs to be addressed. Present them in decreasing order of severity. For each issue:
      • Briefly describe where the issue occurs in the site, and what the issue is. (1-2 sentences)
      • Say which heuristic you think is violated, and why. (1-2 sentences)
      • Include your screenshot to help make it clearer to the reader where and what the issue is.
      • Make a suggestion for how the site could be changed to address the issue. You can keep this at a conceptual level, you don’t need to spell out the changes in detail. (1-2 sentences)

Submission and Grading