Heuristic Evaluation Plan

1 Introduction

The website is an online retailer that specializes in selling a variety of sports equipment. These include dumbbells in all variations, machines for muscle training or cardio. You can also find other usefull gadgets like massagers, table tennis equipment, trampolins and little plastic bikes for kids. They also ship in every european country.

The objective of this Heuristic Evaluation is to find potential problems with the websites design, which could have a negative impact on the user's buying experience and sales. This includes the usability of the website, the design and the comparison to other websites, selling comparable products.

2 Evaluation Methodology

Heuristic evaluation is a way to evaluate a user interface by looking at it and judging the interface according to certain rules. This opinion based method is not meant to replace more thorough evaluations like empirical studies but rather a cost effective way to weed out obvious problems with an interface and improve usability in most situations, developed by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich in 1990 [Nie1990].

For the heuristic inspection an evaluation plan is needed. For the evaluation plan it is firstly important to choose the heuristics. Depending on the heuristics chosen different aspects of the design will be evaluated, leading to different potential problems being spotted.

It is also important to choose the right inspectors. Inspectors should have a high degree of knowledge in the field of human computer interaction. They should also know about the domain of the system. Because it is difficult to find one person with all these skills, multiple inspectors from different backgrounds are recommended.

The inspectors fill out the reports immediately, this makes recording the sessions not very useful. If the inspector talks about their thoughts during the inspection it can make sense to record them. Depending on the prior knowledge of the inspector it may be necessary to give them some information on how to run an evaluation. [Wil2009].

For this evaluation, the "Andrews General Usability Heuristics", shown in Appendix A.1, will be used. These are based on and slightly adapted from Nielsen's revised set of ten usability heuristics [Nie1994a].

Finally, after compiling the identified user interface defects into an aggregate, recommendations are deduced. This interpretation of the findings can be very skewed depending on the skill and domain knowledge of the inspectors, thus it is advised to involve real users and/or domain experts. [Sto2005]

3 User Profiles

The website tries to attract everyone who wants to engage in sports. From the casual athlete to the determined fitness-freak. Since the website has a really broad collection of sports equipment it really offers something for everyone. We came up with the following groups:

• Dedicated/high performance group: People who follow a certain sport on a professional level, like boxers, weightlifters, etc.
• Casual workout group: People who set themselves a goal, like loosing weight, building up strength, etc. These people probably visit gyms regularly and want some of the sports equipment in their own home.
• Entertainment group: People who search for entertainment more than having a set goal in mind. This group is more interested in trampolines, table tennis, slacklines, etc.
• Wellness, Yoga, Massage group: People who enjoy a more calm sports like yoga or gymnastics or just want to relax a bit.
• Sportswear, additional features group: People who don't look for sport devices but rather sportswear, or small fitness helpers like pulse monitors or cycling watches. We also added users who are interested in sport nutrition to this group.
• Committed givers: People who want to buy a present for children, like small scooters, gokarts or stall bars.

4 Extent of the Evaluation

We will evaluate various different aspects of the website sport-tiedje.at. Some of those aspects will be the website's overall design, layout, navigation, content and finally we will evaluate the functionality. For this task we will examine the entire website. We will evaluate the website using various usability heuristics based on Jacob Nielsen and Rolf Molich in 1990 [Nie1990].

5 Evaluators and Evaluation Environments

The evaluators will use the evaluation environments shown in Table 1.

Alex will use OBS Studio to record his screen. David Bom will use ffmpeg to record and cut the video and audacity to do the same with audio. If ffmpeg is configured correct no further should transcoding should be needed, but can be done with ffmpeg with ease. Muxing the audio with the video will also be done with ffmpeg. Raphael will user the native Samsung Screen Recorder to record his screen and Adobe Premiere Pro for cutting. David Knill will use the native IOS Screen Recorder to record his screen and the native "Voice Memos" App to record his voice. He will use Davinci Resolve 18 to combine Audio and Video.

Since the IPhone SE (2020) has a native screen resolution of 750×1334 it is below the limit of 1080×1920 and no downscaling is needed. The video will be exported in native resolution. OBS Studio offers the possibility to scale the resolution so we don't need to care about downscaling or our native screen resolution.

The Samsung Galaxy S20+ has a way higher resolution than the iPhone, so we will have to scale it down to 1080p. In Order to do that, Adobe Premiere Pro will be used. It will also be used to cut the videos to the short clips, after the Samsung Screen Recorder Software has captured them.

References

[Nie1990]

Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich; Heuristic Evaluation of User Interfaces; Proc. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’90). ACM. Seattle, Washington, USA, Apr 1990, pages 249–256. doi:10.1145/97243.97281

[Nie1994a]

Jakob Nielsen; Enhancing the Exploratory Power of Usability Heuristics; Proc. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’94). ACM. Boston, Massachusetts, USA, Apr 1994, pages 152–158. doi:10.1145/191666.191729

[Nie1994b]

Jakob Nielsen; How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation; 01 Nov 1994. https://nngroup.com/articles/how-to-conduct-a-heuristic-evaluation/

[Wil2009]

Chauncey Wilson; User Experience Re-Mastered: Your Guide to Getting the Right Design Morgan Kaufmann, 2010, pages 359-373 doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-375114-0.00016-5

[Sto2005]

Debbie Stone, Caroline Jarrett, Mark Woodroffe, Shailey Minocha; User Interface Design and Evaluation; Amsterdam, Morgan Kaufmann, March 2005 ISBN 0120884364

A Materials

The following materials will be used by the evaluation team.