Posted in Website Usability Testing	January 9, 2008

Heuristic Evaluation (one-on-one)

A heuristic evaluation is one of the more popular methods of usability testing and takes place with a functional website, likely in the last stages of development or right before a redesign. This is the type of lab setting that we showed you in Monday's tip How to Conduct a Usability Lab, and requires a computer with a webcam and usability software like Morae, a moderator, and a user.

In this usability test, you are required to come up with 5-10 major tasks such as:

• Subscribe to the email newsletter
• Download a free report
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Purchase a book
• Unsubscribe from email list

The user is then recorded via webcam and the usability software while being timed performing each task. You will want to set a time limit for each task, from 60 seconds to three minutes. In general, if a user takes three minutes to find and subscribe to an email newsletter, the site has failed this task. Come up with a scorecard to document these times and scores.