'Top lists' as heuristics for simple usability evaluations
Heuristic usability evaluations are a discount usability engineering method for quick, cheap and easy evaluation of interfaces; but if you can't or don't dare to apply usual heuristics, here's an alternative: 'top lists'.
Heuristic evaluation is one of the most popular usability techniques; it basically consists of reviewing an interface and check if it fulfills some well-known guidelines and principles (the "heuristics").
Once you overcome the fear of performing a task with such a fancy name, the following step is obvious: choosing the heuristics (guidelines) to use. There are some popular heuristics lists, but there are some risks when using them for a usability evaluation:
- If the heuristics are too generic, they don't help you to identify real issues.
- Otherwise, if the heuristics include detailed checkpoints, you may concentrate on small or very specific issues while overlooking the important ones.
Consequently I suggest using alternative heuristics: the 'top lists'.
Which lists?
With 'top lists' I am referring to lists similar to these by Jakob Nielsen:
- The ten very worst design mistakes of all time
- Most violated homepage guidelines
- Top homepage usability guidelines
- Good deeds in Web design
- Web design mistakes (2005)
- Web design mistakes (2003)
- Web design mistakes (2002)
- Web design mistakes (1999)
- Web design mistakes (1996)
- Application design mistakes
- Information Architecture (IA) mistakes
I think this kind of guidelines might be used (or the mistakes avoided) in small projects, or even in big projects as a preliminar evaluation, or in other situations.

RSS
Ingeniero en Informática que usa en ocasiones el alias RamSys y que está interesado en todo lo que relacione lo humano con lo tecnológico: usabilidad, diseño, interfaces, psicología, ...

Menú de Operación









Mucho (incluso más de lo habitual) se ha hablado últimamente de
Es posible que acabes de llegar al mundo del diseño de páginas web, o lleves más tiempo en él. La cuestión es que has oído hablar de usabilidad, accesibilidad, estándares… Todo eso suena realmente bien, y decides que son materias que debes tener en cuenta; hay toneladas de información en la red sobre esos temas, así que… ¿por dónde empezar con todo eso?
Hace bastante tiempo que tengo en mente una idea para desarrollar una aplicación web y, cuando me decidí por fin a implementarla, elegí 