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Reading group report

Topic: Design heuristics
Date: May 3, 2004

Readings

Overview of topic

The aim of this session was to introduce the topic of design heuristics.

  • Heuristics are rules of thumb or general principles of good design
  • Design heuristics, or more accurately, heuristic evaluation (evaluation of the usability of a design using heuristics) was developed in 1990 by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich
  • Heuristic evaluation is widely used in industry as a discount usability method
  • There is some debate about which heuristics are best to use (see Bailey), but the Nielsen/Molich heuristics (altered slightly in the mid 1990s by Nielsen) are the most widely used.
  • Nielsen's heuristics were developed for software, but can be used for the web (see Instone and Pearrow)
  • Heuristic evaluation must be done by experts, otherwise 10 heuristic principles end up turning into long or non-descript laundy lists (Pierotti and Gaffney) that become difficult to use.

Summary

Twelve people attended this session:

  • Stephanie Foott and Jenny Dewar from the Monash Library
  • Tom Bolton from the Faculty of Business and Economics web team
  • Michael Lowe from the Faculty of Education web team
  • Paul Trahair, Fiona Andrewartha, Shanan Holm, Daniel May and Peter from Flexible Learning and Teaching (my.monash)
  • Guy Sangwine, Scott Rippon and Dey Alexander from Web Resources and Development.

Each gave a 99 second (or thereabouts) presentation based on the readings. Presentation themes included:

  • danger of heuristics in non-expert hands
  • need to know the context, relevance to user needs
  • heuristics are just checkpoints
  • heuristic evaluation sometimes often used as a substitute for more rigourous usability engineering methods
  • are huge checklists (like the one from Pierotti) useful and usable?
  • need to focus on holistic design and communication with users
  • Nielsen's heuristics are a dodgy fit for website evaluation
  • the word "heuristic" set off my bullshit detector; where's the real world stuff in here?
  • UCD is touchy feely, gets in the way, data suggests its own taxonomy
  • we have a set of individual websites that might be ok in isolation, but we have nothing that brings them together
  • heuristics have their pros and cons which we need to be aware of
  • heuristics are broad design principles, not useful to new designers; guidelines come closer, but patterns are more useful
  • heuristics will evolve over time and will be different in different contexts
  • some heuristics are valuable, e.g. consistency, speak the user's language

Paul Trahair won the chocolate prize for the most flambouyant presentation.

There was time for a 20 minute discussion afterwards. This ranged over a wide array of topics. For those who wanted the name of the book that ended up being discussed in brief it was Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things - a must-read for all designers/developers.

Photos


Stephanie's 99 seconds


Tom and Jenny ponder the reading material


Mike during his presentation


Shanan (left) and Paul listen to a speaker


Dey (centre) used Guy (left) and Scott (right) as props, and tshirts instead of death by powerpoint. Daniel (far left) looks on.

Tshirts

The tshirt designs (shown above) can be downloaded and printed. Don't forget to reverse the design before you print if using an iron-on tshirt transfer.