Stage 2: Heuristics

This brings us to the next stage of development, and the penultimate step towards completing a cost-effective, yet fruitful usability testing plan.

It is at this point that the site has been coded and uploaded to the testing server. With a bigger budget
extensive laboratory testing might be conducted. But as it is, I'm once again seeking inspired workarounds.

With a functioning, navigable “rough draft” of the site, there are some more free, or at the very least, very cheap tools to consider utilizing.

For $15 I can direct “expert” reviewers to my site and receive comprehensive feedback on my site. Where can I do this? At Feedback Army of course. This website offers a service putting your site in touch with “Turks” from “Mechanical Turk”, a work force employed by Amazon.com. As advertised, the workforce is comprised of a college-educated majority from around the United States and the world, that get paid to complete “human intelligence tasks”. In effect, they serve as the “participants” in the usability test, except that they do so remotely, and for very little recompense. Just how effective they are at determining usability issues is up to the researcher's discretion, of course, but for the price, as compared to thousands of dollars to conduct the same tasks and ask the same questions in a lab, it is probably worth at least one go 'round.

At this point I would also employ a basic heuristic evaluation based on one of the several heuristic evaluation checklists circulating on the Web, the most popular and well-known being Jakob Nielsen's heuristic checklist and “how-to” guide.


Another excellent, albeit long, checklist can be found here.

With checklist in hand, the next step is to find a few persons willing to sit with me and actually work through the list alongside the nearly-finished product. This is no small task, but it can be done remotely. Ideally, however, this is done by expert evaluators or with the researcher available, in person, to explain what in the world the checklist is asking.

If the researcher is lucky enough to have access to Morae usability testing software, there is an excellent guide to setting up a Nielsen heuristics test.
Find it here.