Usability Heuristics

Only available on StudyMode
  • Topic: Usability, Heuristic evaluation, Heuristic
  • Pages : 2 (546 words )
  • Download(s) : 72
  • Published : April 30, 2013
Open Document
Text Preview
Vamsi Koduru
Informatics 131
Professor Redmiles
March 14, 2013
Human Computer Interactions: Usability Heuristics
Throughout the years as user interfaces have become more complex and detailed there has been an ever increasing need to ensure that these interfaces are easy to use and understand. Whether it be the formatting tools of Microsoft Word or the menus on an Apple’s Mac OSx, usability heuristics have played a major role in determining the fate of certain features and their respective layouts on the software. With computers becoming ever more accessible each year the need for heuristic evaluation has also risen exponentially. Every major software that has been released today has undergone some form of heuristic evaluation to ensure that it is indeed useable to some extent due to its cheap and efficient nature of feedback to the developers. That being said it also has some downsides due to that it requires a lot of training and knowledge to be able to properly apply the heuristics in the testing phase. The goal of this essay is to discuss several of the usability heuristics and their role in the development phase and how it ensures that a more user friendly interface or design will be made. Visibility of System Status

The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time- Jakob Nielson. This heuristic is very self explanatory based on its definition, however it does play a major role in many interfaces that we encounter on a daily basis. How frustrating would it be if Eclipse didn’t give us proper feedback whenever we ran a test? This is an essential heuristic to test and implement because it will help inform the user if they are correctly using the interface or software and if not what needs to be fixed. We can see this being implemented in various websites when we try to change our password with the green or red markers on the side of the box informing us if that is a...
tracking img