Heuristic and cognitive walk- Through evaluations

Аннотация

Intranet teams must continually evaluate, adapt, and modify their sites. As more features and applications are added to the intranet, the user interface inevitably becomes more complex. To keep pace with the new projects and tools coming downstream, intranet teams need a range of tools to effectively identi-fy usability problems and remedy them. Empirical testing with real users is the best way to evaluate user interfaces. However, sometimes it is difficult to recruit enough real users to test all aspects of design. Usability inspection methods and walk-through techniques are ex-cellent supplements to empirical testing in the lab or field, working hand in hand with empirical testing. There are a number of different usability inspection methods, including heuristic evaluation, cognitive walk-throughs, pluralistic walk-throughs, fea-ture inspection, consistency inspection, and standards inspection. Two tech-niques worth adding to your toolkit are heuristic evaluations and team cogni-tive walk-throughs.