Heuristic Evaluation CPSC 481 Week 10 Tutorial 1

Heuristic Evaluation CPSC 481 Week 10 Tutorial 1

Today’s Activity: Heuristic Evaluation General steps: 1. Perform an independent assessment of which heuristics a system violates 2. With a small group of 4, discuss and aggregate your individual results, listed by heuristic 3. Assign severity ratings for each bug 4. Presentation on five or six most important bugs to fix 2

System: Accuvote http: //snipurl. com/accuvote This is a simulation of an electronic voter terminal. These have gotten significant play in the US media due to fears of voter fraud/system bugs, etc. Imagine that you are brought in to evaluate this system, and to identify issues that need to be addressed. 3

1. Individual Assessment (20 mins) a. Create a Google Docs Spreadsheet with the following columns: Name, Heuristic Violated, Description, Suggested Fix b. Perform your assessment on Accuvote with the 10 Heuristics Handout c. Note that you may identify a bug that doesn’t fit a particular heuristic. Feel free to note this without a heuristic number. d. For each bug under the name field, just put your name in there. 4

2. Aggregate Bugs (20 -40 min) a. Find a group of 3 with at least two people that you haven’t worked with before b. Merge all of your spreadsheets together into a single spreadsheet c. Re-order the bugs according to the Heuristic violated d. Discuss each bug with every member of your group, and remove duplicate bugs 5

3. Assign Severity Ratings (10 mins) a. Get a copy of the aggregate list from your group b. Individually, assign severity ratings for each bug 0 – don’t think this is a usability problem 1 – cosmetic problem 2 – minor usability problem 3 – major usability problem; important to fix 4 – usability catastrophe; must fix c. Return to your group, and discuss severity ratings where there is high variance (e. g. >= 2 pt difference), and find agreement 6

4. Present and Discuss (5 mins prep, 5 min presentation) a. Prepare a short presentation on the top 5 -6 bugs that need to be fixed, providing your suggested fix, and rationale for severity rating b. Do presentations c. Discussion 7