Assignment 3

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Group Members: Matt, Alice, Ed, Brian

What were the most severe problems with the app/site? How do these problems fit
into Nielsen’s heuristic categories? What are some suggestions to fix the UI, and
how do your proposed changes relate to the heuristic categories?

Logging in does not always work:

  • Logging only works about half of the time.
  • This fits within H9.  Doesn’t tell you why there is an error and there is no graceful recovery.
  • Which problems, if any, were made easier to find (or potentially easier to correct)

Help menus don’t actually exist:

  • Help menus are in Window’s ’98 format
  • Most of the links crash
  • The falls under H10

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/49220792/score_menu.png

There are no icons anywhere

  • For example, finding quintile rank.  You just have to know where it is or have someone tell you.
  • This falls broadly under H6

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25731678/Screen%20Shot%202013-03-12%20at%204.00.10%20PM.png

No consistency on the site (Violates H4)

  • Mixture of links, tabs, and dropdowns
  • H2: Their conceptions of tabs is weird.  Clicking on a tab can bring you to a new page.

Which problems, if any, were made easier to find (or potentially easier to correct)
by the list of Nielsen’s heuristics? (That is, if we had asked you to perform a
usability evaluation of the app/site without first discussing heuristics, what might
you have overlooked?)

Help and Documentation

  • I would never have otherwise looked at the documentations

Lack of Icons

  • It’s not something you actually think about.  How much you use icons to navigate through a web page.

Did anyone encounter usability problems that seemed to not be included under
any of Nielsen’s heuristics? If so, what additional heuristics might you propose
for this type of application or site?

  • When the help just crashes or the login just doesn’t work.  That is just a bug.  Maybe adding a heuristic for “just not working.”
  • Unnecessary Functionality (It’s not quite minimalist design its a little different):  For example you can email someone from inside SCORE and no one every does that.
  • Usability across different devices:  SCORE doesn’t work at all on mobile or tablet devices.

What might be some useful class discussion questions—or final exam questions—
related to heuristic evaluation?

  • Why is recognition vs. recall important?
  • What are some examples of “matching between the system and the real world”?
  • What are some methods of preventing users from making errors?
  • Which of these heuristics might provide the biggest impact on the users?  Which is most likely to lead to high severity problems?

PDF’s of Students Notes: