Assignment Background

One key learning of my "Utility and Usability: Human-Centered Design" class involved ensuring products are usable, intuitive, and easy to use. To meet this standard, our lecture deep-dived into heuristics and how to evaluate products using preestablished heuristic standards.

For this lecture, it was HEAVILY emphasized there are many more usability heuristic sets than the NN Group, but it was the one introduced to students in most universities!

Assignment Task

I conducted a Heuristic Evaluation on AllTrails. I also provided task flows to narrow down areas of the website to evaluate.

Once we performed the task flows our job was to report our evaluations by…

• Categorizing frustrations or errors to a heuristic.

• Explain how frustrations or errors violated a heuristic.

• Note how a user might think or feel from the violation.

• Evaluate if the heuristic violation is minor or critical.

What was a difficult part you faced during the assignment?

Categorizing frustrations or errors into the correct category proved to be extremely difficult. For example, abandoning a review causes a "Thanks for Sharing" screen instead of confirming abandonment. I wasn't sure if it violated the heuristic of "visibility of system status" or "help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors".

In our next lecture, we learned this is a common issue throughout careers. Instead, we should focus on clearly communicating how the error violates the heuristic — within a reasonable category.

Feedback and Learnings

Don't overthink everything

From the UX Designer perspective, we see heuristic violations that can be extremely minor. In the design process, it's important to keep in mind that the average user wouldn't notice some of the violations. Otherwise, we spend time fixing non-existent problems from the user perspective.