A Heuristic Evaluation is a method for identifying problems in a user interface. Heuristic Evaluation is based on Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for UI Design which is used to identify the problems. I briefly looked at the 10 Usability Heuristics last year but didn’t really appreciate their application until now. Having more experience I can now appreciate their importance far more, and see how valuable they are in creating a successful UI.
To explore them more, I did a Heuristic Evaluation of the Translink Website, to get practical experience of the Heuristic Evaluation Process.
The first step of the process was to explore the Translink website and any problems I found with the usability. This was fairly easy due to how flawed the Translink website is, but what was more challenging was identifying what Heuristic Value was being violated due to many problems managing to violate multiple at once. After identifying the violation, we rated the severity of the violation and discussed our findings in groups.
After discussing in groups, we decided that the Time Table page was the area we wanted to focus on improving, due to finding multiple issues and violations on what a relatively small page. Due to how many issues were on this page, we all had different things we had found within it, which was great as it allowed us to get a really in-depth analysis of the page.
We isolated the page and began annotating the issues on it and ways to fix them. We had some ideas around a way to completely rework the timetable page, however, felt that the best way to complete the heuristic evaluation was to work with what was already there, rather than starting a new system from scratch. The main issues were around the structure and information in the table itself, as you can see below, as well as issues around the filtering system.
After identifying and discussing how we could fix these issues, we sketched out what we thought the timetable page should look like with changes.
The biggest change was swapping columns and rows, as we felt the stops should be on the horizontal as this made more sense when looking at this like a timeline. Also, from a more technical perspective, having the stops horizontally followed a better convention, as they were the dependent variable of the table.