In this class, we’ll practice doing a heuristic evaluation of a web service using Jakob Nielsen’s set of 10 heuristics.
Before we dive in, we’ll need to go over what each of these heuristics mean. Here’s a set of PowerPoint slides to help with that. For each of the heuristics, it gives an example of software or a web page that violates that heuristic, and another that follows the heuristic.
For the evaluation itself, we will examine a new system called DegreeWorks that Western has purchased to help students plan their progress toward a degree.
Play around with DegreeWorks with the 10 heuristics in mind. Try everything out – click on things, try entering things in fields, and so on. Try to set up situations that should generate an error, so you can see what happens. Try an action and see how easy it is to back out of it or undo it. Even mature software systems will typically have at least some issues you can identify using the heuristics. See if you can come up with 5 issues with this service. For each issue, indicate which heuristic or heuristics are violated.