From UX heuristics to an application for evaluations: user roles

Using a compilation of UX heuristics as starting point, let's take the first step to create an application for evaluations: defining user roles.

jordisan March 29, 2021 accessibility, Constantine & Lockwood, design, heuristics, IN ENGLISH, TECH, UCD (User-Centered Design), usability, UX (User eXperience), UX manager No Comments
From UX heuristics to an application for evaluations: user roles

(TL;DR: user roles at UX manager)

When we talk about usability heuristics, Nielsen always comes to mind; but they are not the only ones. At heuristics.uxmanager.net you have a compilation of usability heuristics, including some for specific cases like Single-Page Applications (SPA) or mobile, and even a set from a psychological point of view. All of them are also available as a spreadsheet so you can use them for your own evaluations.

Besides those heuristics, the website includes a collection of accessibility guidelines including WCAG 2.1, all of them also as spreadsheets. Although they are usually considered as different techniques, in practice both usability heuristic evaluations and accessibility evaluations are similar in essence (i.e., checking if an interface accomplishes a set of principles), and even the specialists that perform them are many times the same.

So we have a compilation of usability heuristics and accessibility guidelines, and even spreadsheets to use them for evaluations; what else can we do with them?

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forUSE: usage-centered design (recovered)

Some articles about Usage-Centered Design by Constantine & Lockwood, recovered from their former forUSE website.

jordisan December 30, 2015 Constantine & Lockwood, IN ENGLISH, personas, TECH, UCD (User-Centered Design), UCDmanager, UX (User eXperience) 1 Comment

The usage-centered design approach to UX design (as defined by Constantine & Lockwood) has been always a reference to me. Their articles describe practical well-defined techniques which I think can (and should) be included in development processes, and my humble opinion is that it deserves more attention than it gets.

Usage-centered design itself has been viewed as providing already established and effective methods for putting activity-centered design into practice and for overcoming some of the stated shortcomings of human-centered design (Norman, 2006).

Actually, I used their descriptions of techniques for Personas, User Roles and (Abstract) Use Cases as the basis for their implementation into UCDmanager. One of the main reasons for this choice is that they set the basis for a design methodology which includes different interrelated techniques, instead of the toolbox of heterogeneous independent methods we usually have.

Sadly, it seems that their forUSE website is no longer active (although it still can be accessed through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine). That’s why I’m recovering here some of their articles. (more…)