Ever since hearing about "Reboot":http://www.reboot.dk/ three years ago, I've wanted to attend this Scandinavian conference. I was supposed to speak last year, but fate conspired against me. However Jeremy went, and by all accounts knocked their socks off with a love letter in praise of the hyperlink. Jeremy came back all enthused, so I set a reminder iCal as well as a mental note to attend.
Last week I had the pleasure of attending "XTech 2007":http://2007.xtech.org/ in gay Paris. I've not been to XTech before, but "Jeremy":http://adactio.com/ spoke there last year and really enjoyed it, so I wanted to check it out.
In the last month I've attended four conferences, and spoken at three of them. I've already talked about "SXSWi 2007":http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2007/03/another_year_another_southby/ in some detail, so though I'd give the other events a quick write-up.
So "SXSWi 2007":http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive/ is officially over, and I'm sat in the departure lounge of LAX waiting for my connecting flight to San Francisco and collecting my thoughts. I've had an excellent time again this year, catching up with old friends and making new ones.
Heuristic evaluation is a technique that involves analysing the usability of a website against a set of general usability precepts. One or more "experts" will analyse the target site, often following a series of pre-defined scenarios. Whenever they encounter an issue that breaks one of the precepts or "heuristics", they will note the issue and sometimes the severity. Heuristic evaluation is usually done either to augment usability testing, or where usability testing is impractical or cost prohibitive. Heuristic evaluation is considered slightly more objective than a simple "expert review" as the results are based upon generally agreed guidelines rather than personal opinion. There are a number of different usability heuristics around, but the most popular ones on the web are Jakob Nielsen's "10 usability heuristics":http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html and Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini's "basic principles for interface design":http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html As part of my consultancy work at Clearleft I run a lot of expert reviews and heuristic evaluations. While planning a recent evaluation, I started to feel that the existing heuristics didn't accurately describe the requirements of a modern web application. In particular I felt that Mr Nielsens heuristics were somewhat convoluted, contained a lot of overlap and varied widely in terms of scope and specificity. Since Mr Nielsen first created his heuristics back in 1990, the web has changed on a lot. Many of the underlying principals remain the same, but their relative weight has shifted. So using these heuristics as a starting point, I set out to create a set of web application heuristics that better reflected the current landscape. Usability heuristics are by their nature subjective, so I don't claim what follows is a definitive list. However I have tried hard to cover as many common usability issues as possible. There is still a lot of overlap, but I think this is because one problem can the result of multiple causes. Anyway, this is just a first draft so I'm really keen to hear your opinions.
I witnessed something happen on a web developer mailing list the other day which I'm not proud of, but which is all too common in our industry. A group of experienced users rounded on a group of less experienced users for making a simple error, and then proceeded to put them down in public for their "stupidity and laziness" in not learning the system.