WEBVTT 00:00:03.003 --> 00:00:06.598 In this session, I'm going to be talking about something that's referred to 00:00:06.598 --> 00:00:11.232 either as *expert evaluation* or *heuristic evaluation*. 00:00:15.440 --> 00:00:20.682 It's an evaluation done by one or more experts  using a set of guidelines, 00:00:20.682 --> 00:00:25.813 and evaluating whether a solution meets those guidelines, how well it meets the guidelines, 00:00:25.813 --> 00:00:28.000 where it is deficient. 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:33.942 So, expert or heuristic evaluations rely on the experience and the expertise of the evaluator. 00:00:33.942 --> 00:00:39.040 So, you can't really do these things without  understanding some of the basic concepts 00:00:39.040 --> 00:00:41.859 of interaction design and usability. 00:00:41.859 --> 00:00:44.820 I mentioned at the outset that you would be using guidelines, 00:00:44.820 --> 00:00:47.443 but those guidelines are *not* self-explanatory, 00:00:47.443 --> 00:00:52.569 so you have to understand what a good solution to a particular problem, what you're trying to achieve, 00:00:52.569 --> 00:00:56.041 would look like because as you're doing evaluations 00:00:56.041 --> 00:01:00.000 and as the industry changes on a  regular basis, 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:03.964 then you have to appreciate whether or not the solutions you're seeing 00:01:03.964 --> 00:01:07.334 actually conform to the guidelines in front of you. 00:01:07.334 --> 00:01:12.212 Heuristics are these rules of thumb based on *good  practice and known problems in design*. 00:01:12.212 --> 00:01:16.753 And they can be used from the very early design through to finished solutions. 00:01:16.753 --> 00:01:21.128 And you can even do expert or heuristic evaluations on 00:01:21.128 --> 00:01:25.085 just sketches if that would be helpful. 00:01:25.102 --> 00:01:29.767 It probably is more sensible a little bit later in the process, 00:01:29.767 --> 00:01:36.835 but certainly there's no impediment to looking at maybe the general layout of screens 00:01:36.835 --> 00:01:42.800 and saying, well, this screen is quite possibly overly complicated for 00:01:42.800 --> 00:01:49.962 the problem in hand and the customers or users that you're trying to target. 00:01:49.962 --> 00:01:56.380 It is relatively inexpensive in that hiring in a consultant for one or two days is actually 00:01:56.380 --> 00:02:00.848 very much cheaper than conducting usability evaluations. 00:02:00.848 --> 00:02:04.921 But immediately following, you'll notice that I mentioned that it's 00:02:04.921 --> 00:02:10.183 *not as effective as testing with real users*. And that is certainly the case. 00:02:10.183 --> 00:02:14.228 However, if you had a lot of novel designs and you wanted to get 00:02:14.228 --> 00:02:17.204 some idea about whether they were going to be effective, 00:02:17.204 --> 00:02:22.240 then inviting people in who actually do  usability testing who are experts in the field 00:02:22.240 --> 00:02:27.672 will get you a lot of feedback without nearly so  much cost as a lot of usability testing, 00:02:27.672 --> 00:02:37.121 which can get quite expensive just because of having  to recruit, reward, hire facilities, and so on. 00:02:41.680 --> 00:02:47.760 Jakob Nielsen published his book on User  Interface Engineering back in the early 1990s, 00:02:47.760 --> 00:02:53.260 and these are his 10 basic UI (user interface)  heuristics. 00:02:53.260 --> 00:02:59.058 And they haven't really changed, although when we actually go out to do something like benchmarking, 00:02:59.058 --> 00:03:03.000 we have a very much more detailed set of heuristics. 00:03:03.000 --> 00:03:08.513 But these are a useful starting point, and they're talking about fairly generic concepts like 00:03:08.513 --> 00:03:14.483 *visibility of system status* and making sure that people understand where they are in the process. 00:03:14.483 --> 00:03:17.896 And that, of course, is  a good thing no matter what you're doing. 00:03:17.896 --> 00:03:21.678 And detailed design does actually flow out of that 00:03:21.678 --> 00:03:26.273 – for example, letting people know that they've got things in their shopping basket. 00:03:26.273 --> 00:03:30.810 That is an example of the visibility of system status. 00:03:30.810 --> 00:03:34.727 *Match between the system and the real world* – and that's something I've already alluded to 00:03:34.727 --> 00:03:39.109 when I was referring to terminology. The mapping sometimes is also physical. 00:03:39.109 --> 00:03:45.780 If you're talking about the natural tendency for increasing the quantity of something, it tends to be *up*. 00:03:45.780 --> 00:03:50.308 So, if you've got a slider, then up or to the right is 'more' 00:03:50.308 --> 00:03:54.826 and down or to the left is 'less'. And that's just what we call *natural mapping*. 00:03:54.826 --> 00:04:00.327 *User control and freedom* – being flexible, allowing people to go back and fix things. 00:04:00.327 --> 00:04:04.960 Bear in mind that when user  interface design was relatively new 00:04:04.960 --> 00:04:10.142 on sort of the large scale back in the 1990s 00:04:10.142 --> 00:04:15.440 when Windows 3.1, which was kind of the very first 00:04:15.440 --> 00:04:20.560 successful version of Windows, and of course the World Wide Web came around about the same time, 00:04:20.560 --> 00:04:25.040 it was uncommon, it was very unusual to have Undo functions. 00:04:25.040 --> 00:04:29.040 If you made a mistake and you needed to fix it, then you had to fix it yourself. 00:04:29.040 --> 00:04:33.762 There was no Control-Z or any kind of undo facility. 00:04:33.762 --> 00:04:37.740 It was something that you had to do, and we take that for granted now, but 00:04:37.740 --> 00:04:41.281 it was not the case in the early days. 00:04:41.354 --> 00:04:44.576 *Consistency and standards* – users should not have to wonder whether 00:04:44.576 --> 00:04:47.921 different words, situations or actions mean the same thing. 00:04:47.925 --> 00:04:51.159 And this continues to be a problem in some areas. 00:04:51.159 --> 00:04:57.629 Certainly on intranets within large organizations, you would find that one department had its own set of 00:04:58.080 --> 00:05:04.141 visual guidelines with its own visual language which was totally different to the next department. 00:05:04.141 --> 00:05:07.280 And if you were unlucky enough to have to move between 00:05:07.280 --> 00:05:11.707 those departments on the intranet, then you were in a bit of trouble. 00:05:11.707 --> 00:05:15.854 It doesn't happen so much these days with the web – e-commerce, for example; 00:05:15.854 --> 00:05:21.173 people do try very hard to make sure that users are going to have a fairly painless experience, 00:05:21.173 --> 00:05:27.265 and so we do tend to see things laid out with very *similar terminology and visual language* 00:05:27.265 --> 00:05:30.991 between totally different e-commerce sites. And to be honest, there, 00:05:30.991 --> 00:05:35.871 Amazon, because they are so large and popular, has been something of a yardstick. 00:05:35.871 --> 00:05:39.690 And most people, when they're asking for advice on how to do something in e-commerce, 00:05:39.690 --> 00:05:44.738 I would refer them to the Amazon site and usually for very good reason. 00:05:44.738 --> 00:05:49.100 *Error prevention* is much more successful than dealing with errors. 00:05:49.100 --> 00:05:53.680 Certainly if you're having to discard data or reject data because 00:05:53.680 --> 00:05:56.827 users did not understand how you wanted it formatted, 00:05:56.827 --> 00:06:01.828 you should *not insist that people punctuate things exactly the way you need them*. 00:06:01.828 --> 00:06:06.245 You can do whatever you like with the punctuation once you've got the basic data from them. 00:06:06.245 --> 00:06:09.120 If you want the phone numbers without punctuation, 00:06:09.120 --> 00:06:13.405 then take the punctuation out of the phone number after you've got it. 00:06:13.405 --> 00:06:19.131 If you don't like the spaces in the credit card numbers, then take the spaces out of the credit card numbers. 00:06:19.131 --> 00:06:24.574 So, that isn't something that Jakob talks about here, but it is a different form of error prevention, 00:06:24.574 --> 00:06:30.605 and I wholeheartedly recommended presenting users  with errors and telling them they've done bad 00:06:30.605 --> 00:06:35.377 and should do it over is *not good user experience*. 00:06:35.377 --> 00:06:41.167 *Recognition rather than recall* – and this is the basic premise of *all* user interfaces these days. 00:06:41.167 --> 00:06:47.040 That's the way that we've moved. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, most systems were command line based and 00:06:47.040 --> 00:06:51.891 you had to remember the syntax and spelling of the next command you wanted to enter. 00:06:51.891 --> 00:07:00.006 And when Windows and the Mac came along, both having stolen their designs from Xerox PARC, 00:07:00.006 --> 00:07:03.911 then we got what we used to refer to as *WYSIWYG* – What You See Is What You Get. 00:07:03.911 --> 00:07:09.398 We don't talk about that much these days, but it was all about *recognition*, which people are very much better at, 00:07:09.398 --> 00:07:15.122 than recall; so, you can *recognize things much more easily* than you can recall them from scratch. 00:07:15.122 --> 00:07:22.253 *Flexibility and efficiency of use* – and usually there is a trade-off between what you might call 00:07:22.253 --> 00:07:28.142 *design for learning*  and *design for efficiency*. 00:07:28.142 --> 00:07:31.872 That is all tied up with flexibility and efficiency of use. 00:07:31.872 --> 00:07:37.047 By making things *flexible and efficient*, you're often making them *harder to use*. 00:07:37.047 --> 00:07:41.867 So, that's where the tension in the design comes in. 00:07:42.560 --> 00:07:47.752 *Aesthetic and minimalist design* – people like  websites that look attractive 00:07:47.752 --> 00:07:50.727 and that they trust from a visual design perspective. 00:07:50.727 --> 00:07:56.112 And it is important that we *do not put too much in front of users at once*. 00:07:56.112 --> 00:07:59.520 And so, that's what we mean  by minimalist design. 00:07:59.520 --> 00:08:06.000 *Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors* – something that's actually these days largely overlooked, 00:08:06.000 --> 00:08:10.284 but it's still extremely important on more complex systems; 00:08:10.284 --> 00:08:16.743 things like Microsoft Office, most of the Adobe apps do have behind them a huge body of 00:08:16.743 --> 00:08:22.025 *help and documentation* – usually pretty awfully organized and presented, I have to say. 00:08:22.025 --> 00:08:29.071 It used to be better ten years ago, and we've just for some reason stopped worrying too much about that. 00:08:29.071 --> 00:08:33.272 So, it used to be that if you were looking at a dialog and you wanted help 00:08:33.272 --> 00:08:37.331 with that dialog, you could click on a button  and you would get help on that dialog. 00:08:37.331 --> 00:08:42.286 The best you can hope for these days is that you click on Help and you get taken to a website, 00:08:42.286 --> 00:08:47.354 and you now have to work out how you're going to find out about this specific issue that you are having 00:08:47.354 --> 00:08:54.834 with this specific dialog. So, things have gone a little bit backwards in recent years on that front.