Top Usability Heuristics
Jakob Nielsen has given the 10 most famous usability heuristics, which are used for the user interface designs and act as a guide for Heuristic Evaluation.
- Visibility of system status
- Match between system and the real world
- User control and freedom
- Consistency and standards
- Error prevention
- Recognition rather than recall
- Flexibility and efficiency of use
- Aesthetic and minimalist design
- Help users recognise, diagnose and recover from errors
- Provides help and documentation
With these usability heuristics, usability inspection is made very simple and easy to follow.
Steps in Heuristic Evaluation
As we are aware of the benefits of Heuristic Evaluation, now we shall delve into the steps involved in heuristic evaluation
Come up with a plan
Planning is the foremost part of any successful action; Heuristic Evaluation employs three methods to test the interface. They are
Formulate a set of tasks, which are critical for the site’s success and then it should be tested by the evaluators.
Provide evaluators the objectives and also allow them to develop their own tasks. A goal is given to the evaluator, where they can go ahead and break down the goal into finer tasks and test each of them.
Dialog elements should be assessed by evaluators thoroughly and in-depth as it is the window of the website.
The choice of the method depends on the individual, where time, evaluators, etc., would be taken into consideration, which is the core of planning.
After planning then comes the selection of evaluators, which forms the basis of heuristic evaluations. The number of evaluators depends upon the cost factor of the company. More the number of experts mean more number of usability problems would be identified. Those with experience identify a greater amount of usability problems than with people who have less or no experience. Heuristic evaluation is known to find more than 90% of usability problems if 3 to 5 experienced people perform it.
Thus it is always better to employ the right combination of experts along with novice to get the best result.
Advantages of Heuristic Evaluation
- Economical – Cheap in comparison to other evaluation methods, where the process requires a few testers, thereby lesser use of resources in terms of cost, time and expertise.
- It easily prompts what should be done and easily attracts potential evaluators to use this method (Nielsen & Molich, 1990).
- Progressive planning is not required (Nielsen & Molich, 1990).
- Evaluators do not require formal usability training. In their study, Nielsen and Molich used professional computer programmers and computer science students (Nielsen & Molich, 1990; Nielsen, 1992).
- Can be used at an early stage of the development process (Nielsen & Molich, 1990).
- Faster turnaround time than laboratory testing (Kantner & Rosenbaum, 1997).
A stop to glance through…
Be it Software Testing and Usability Inspection, individually each one have their own importance and relevance. Software Testing and Usability Inspection are complementary to each other and thus the fineness of the end product is dependent on each other. As the Roman proverb goes “No man acquires perfection all at once.” which clearly reveals that both Software Testing and Usability Inspection is required.
Aware, the product developed should be user-friendly, involves less complexity, suits the customer’s needs, and also defect free.
Usability means how better something can be used over the purpose it has been created for, any changes suggested by the usability experts at the time of usability inspection, are the most crucial points that can change the stand of the system in intended/end user’s view. Usability Testing can be performed at each stage of development and after the final product is complete.
Software testing reveals the bugs; Usability inspection reveals the usability issues. We feel both should be implemented at the right time.
Usability testing can be very economical if planned properly, yet highly effective and beneficial.
What they said…
“Over the last year online banking has attracted 6.3 million users, but a massive 3.1 million of those have closed their accounts already due to poor website design and inefficient service”.
- Internet Money Issue 4
“Usability techniques allowed a high-tech company to reduce the time spent on one tedious development task by 40%.”
- Bias & Mayhew, 1994
“Bad design can cost a Website 40 percent of repeat traffic. A good design can keep them coming back. A few tests can make the difference.”
- Kalin, 1999
“Usability goals are business goals. Websites that are hard to use frustrate customers, forfeit revenue and erode brands.”
- McCharty & Souza, Forrester research, September 1998
“Design changes due to usability work in one project at IDS/American Express resulted in savings of $45 million.”
- Chalupnik & Rinehart, 1992
“Measure twice, cut once.”
- Norm Abram, This Old House
Be it any queries, QC BOSS is here to answer all of them in one go.
Website Content – A deciding factor…
Let me start of with the familiar proverb “First impression is the best impression.” This holds good wherever it is and it is the most important and deciding factor for the success of the product.
The product being a Website, the content of the website should be error free, otherwise it may drastically pull down the quality of the site as well as the product. Be it any site, it should be blemish free or else it would in turn lead the end user to assume or come up with a notion that this site is not the right one as it already contains errors.
A website content is one, which should be short, crisp and up-to-the-point, where the end user is able to understand it at one shot. The lengthier the content, greater would be the extent the user leaves the site.
The common issues which we come across with the website content are spell errors, punctuation mistakes and grammatical errors, which is the regulating factor in the quality of the website content. Let’s just see a few examples of grammatical errors and punctuation errors.
When the right word is not used at the right place. The word ‘complimentary‘ means an appraisal or given for free, whereas ‘complementary‘ means as a part of. We always say ink and pen are complementary to each other and not ink and pen are complimentary to each other, which is incorrect.
Punctuation marks are very important as it convey, what one wants to express, whether the person wants to question, exclaim, command, etc. The intonation of the sentence is distinctively evident with the help of the punctuations and it is very critical for a website content, which gives a clear-cut meaning. Content should never be monotonous as it would allow the reader to exit from the website halfway through. Let’s see this sentence, Hang him not pardon him. This sentence looks unexplainable as the meaning is not clearly conveyed, but then with the use of punctuation the meaning totally changes like ‘Hang him not, pardon him.‘ or ‘Hang him, not pardon him.‘
Just the addition of a comma changes the meaning of the sentences, which clearly proves to be a boon and an added advantage to your website content. Keeping in mind, all the above said points if the website content is framed, definitely your website would have a flawless quality content and will always have a better stand among other websites.
Give us your website content (English Only), Here in QC BOSS – We ensure quality on your website content too.
We check Missing Content | Typo Errors (Both in Text & Alt Tags) | Spelling Errors (Both in Images & Text) | Grammatical Errors (Both in Images & Text) | Casing Errors (Upper Case/Lower Case) | Spacing Errors (Check for unwanted extra space between words) | Repetition of Content (Words/Lines) | Bad Breaks.
With QC BOSS ploughing your content, you would be a proud owner of a perfect website.
Your website is ready. Or is it?
Has it been tested? Verified? Validated?
Our independent software testing services provide validation and verification for websites, portals, and web applications. We offer highly professional testing expertise coupled with personalised service that translates into value for money for you, as our client.
Our services include -
A complete range of testing – system testing, integration testing, functional testing, regression testing, gorilla testing, user acceptance testing, conformance testing, interoperability testing, design check, content check, cross browser/OS testing and performance testing, usability inspection, heuristic evaluations.
Flexible resources – develop a testing solution for your needs, both at our facility or in-house at your office.
In a sea of QA engineers, QC Boss stands apart. Distinct. Effective. Wallet-friendly.
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Usability Inspection
Usability Inspection is referred as a systematic procedural review of a system, based on a number of stipulated guidelines where the user interface is inspected by a number of evaluators. Therefore usability inspection is focused in finding out the usability problems in design, which has always been problematic for users, some areas that get evaluated are the language used in the system, the amount of recall required by the user at each step in a process, the amount of feedback provided by the system to the user. Specific issues such as clarity, consistency, navigation, and error minimisation are analysed thoroughly. Once the problems are identified, the experts give their reviews and recommendations for resolving these issues.
There are also some methods in which, issues like the severity of the usability problems and the overall usability of the entire system is identified. There are many inspection methods, which contribute themselves to the inspection of the user interface specifications that hasn’t necessarily been implemented but then it is clearly feasible that inspection can be performed at an early stage in the usability-engineering life cycle.
Usability Inspection is preferred to any of the traditional laboratory evaluation methods, as usability inspection tools are economical, much cheaper, faster and very reliable as it deals with real time users. Moving ahead we shall delve about the types usability inspection methods. The first one would be Heuristic Evaluation.
Heuristic Evaluation is the most popular and an informal method of the usability inspection, which involves having usability experts who examine the interface and judge its compliance with a set of principles, also known as the (“Heuristics”).
A heuristic evaluation can be carried out at different phases of the development lifecycle; though it’s better to carry out some type of context analysis to help out the experts focus on the actual product usage.
Cognitive Walkthrough is another usability inspection method, which is used to identify usability issues through a particular software or a website, focusing on how easy and user friendly it is for the new users to accomplish tasks with the system. Cognitive walkthrough uses a more explicitly detailed and a simple procedure to simulate a user’s problem-solving process at each step through the dialogue, checking if the simulated user’s goals and memory content can be assumed to lead the users to the next best correct action.
Expert Review – a group of experts inspect a website to identify the potential usability problems faced by the users.
Usability Testing is a priceless usability inspection method, which is used to evaluate a product by testing it on real time users. This method is a very valuable one due to its irreplaceable usability practice, as it gives direct input on how real users use the system. This is in contrast with the usability inspection method where experts use different methods to evaluate a user interface without involving users.
Usability testing aims in determining a product’s capacity to meet its exact purpose. The products that exercise usability testing are websites or web applications, documents, devices and computer interfaces. Usability testing determines the usability of a specific object.
Tools – Now as we deal about the tools, there are a number of Automated Testing Tools that have been developed and are used to evaluate the usability from different perspectives. Some of them are free tools and some are economic tools. Just to name a few
1. Chalkmark – http://www.optimalworkshop.com/chalkmark.htm
2. ClickTale – http://www.clicktale.com/default.aspx
3. OpenHallway – http://www.openhallway.com/
4. Silverback – http://silverbackapp.com/
5. ClickHeat – http://www.labsmedia.com/clickheat/index.html
6. Fivesecondtest – http://fivesecondtest.com/
7. Usabilla – http://www.usabilla.com/
HTTP Status Code
The HTTP is the application layer protocol, which implements the WWW.
When the web itself has many different facets, HTTP is only concerned with one basic function:
“The transfer of hypertext documents and other files from Web Servers to Web Clients. In terms of actual communication, clients are chiefly concerned with making requests to servers, which respond to those requests.”
The responses of the server will be Coded (Status Code).
So when testing with this type of application, we have to make sure that the following status codes should not responded from server.
List of HTTP status codes:
100 => ‘Continue’,
101 => ‘Switching Protocols’,
102 => ‘Processing’,
200 => ‘OK’,
201 => ‘Created’,
202 => ‘Accepted’,
203 => ‘Non-Authoritative Information’,
204 => ‘No Content’,
205 => ‘Reset Content’,
206 => ‘Partial Content’,
207 => ‘Multi-Status’,
226 => ‘IM Used’,
300 => ‘Multiple Choices’,
301 => ‘Moved Permanently’,
302 => ‘Found’,
303 => ‘See Other’,
304 => ‘Not Modified’,
305 => ‘Use Proxy’,
306 => ‘Reserved’,
307 => ‘Temporary Redirect’,
400 => ‘Bad Request’,
401 => ‘Unauthorized’,
402 => ‘Payment Required’,
403 => ‘Forbidden’,
404 => ‘Not Found’,
405 => ‘Method Not Allowed’,
406 => ‘Not Acceptable’,
407 => ‘Proxy Authentication Required’,
408 => ‘Request Timeout’,
409 => ‘Conflict’,
410 => ‘Gone’,
411 => ‘Length Required’,
412 => ‘Precondition Failed’,
413 => ‘Request Entity Too Large’,
414 => ‘Request-URI Too Long’,
415 => ‘Unsupported Media Type’,
416 => ‘Requested Range Not Satisfiable’,
417 => ‘Expectation Failed’,
422 => ‘Unprocessable Entity’,
423 => ‘Locked’,
424 => ‘Failed Dependency’,
426 => ‘Upgrade Required’,
500 => ‘Internal Server Error’,
501 => ‘Not Implemented’,
502 => ‘Bad Gateway’,
503 => ‘Service Unavailable’,
504 => ‘Gateway Timeout’,
505 => ‘HTTP Version Not Supported’,
506 => ‘Variant Also Negotiates’,
507 => ‘Insufficient Storage’,
510 => ‘Not Extended’
STOP
As a website owner, you would ideally wish to convert maximum number of visitors to your site into customers. Imagine a customer leaving your shop without buying anything just because your salesman/ agent could not explain the product to him, even though you had what the customer wanted. The consequence of an incompatible browser is exactly the same. You may have a wonderfully designed site for your business, but what if its features are working only in Internet Explorer and not in Firefox, Netscape or Safari? You would straightaway lose your potential customers.
Sometime back, not many browsers were around to choose from in order to browse the Internet. But today, there are several browsers apart from the different versions in each of them. This scenario leads to a lot of browser compatibility issues in your website, which are seldom noticed by the developers. It needs a very systematic and professional testing approach to find these bugs and resolve them.
Though there are many sources available both online and offline which give suggestions and short-cuts to achieve cross browser compatibility, the best way to ensure browser compatibility is to test all the pages of your website against the different browsers and their versions. We at QC Boss have an expert team to provide you with the excellent services including Browser Compatibility Testing to test your website against all such issues.
A Strategic Approach to Software Testing in Real-Time Systems
Testing is a group of activities that can be designed in beforehand and executed systematically. With this reason a set of stages that we can place particular tests case design techniques and test approaches should be developed for the software engineering procedure. A set of testing strategies have been developed, which gives a template for testing and all include the following features:
1. Testing starts at the modular level and works outward towards the integration of the complete system.
2. Diverse testing techniques are appropriate at diverse points in time.
3. Testing is performed by the programmer of the software and an independent test group.
4. Testing and debugging ate diverse activities, but debugging must be included in any testing strategy.
Testing the Real-Time Systems:
A strategy for testing in real-time systems must include low-level tests that are required to verify that a small source code segment has been executed correctly as well as high-level tests that that validate main system functions based on client requirements. The special characteristic of real-time systems makes them a main challenge when come to testing. The time-dependent type of real-time applications adds a new difficult element to testing.
Not only do the programmer have to look at black/white box testing but also the timing of the data and the parallelism of the projects. In many situation testing data for real-time system may raise errors when the system is in one state but to in others.
Comprehensive test cases design methods for real-time systems have not evolved yet. However, the 4-stage approach can be put as:
1. Task Testing is the first stage is to test independently the tasks of the real-time software.
2. Behavioural Testing using system models produced with CASE tools the behaviour of the real-time system and examine its actions as a result of external events.
3. Intertask Testing is done once errors in individual tasks and in system behaviour have been observed testing passes to time-related external events.
4. Systems Testing; software and hardware are integrated and a full set of systems tests are introduced to uncover errors at the software and hardware interface.
