Tag: heuristics
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Heuristics for understanding older adults as web users
In 2004, Ginny Redish and I, along with Amy Lee, conducted a review of the relevant literature — research by other people — about designing for older adults (people over age 50). Doing this changed my thinking about universal design. It wasn’t enough to generate design heuristics. We also came up with ways to operationalize…
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Designing for older adults: Reviewing 50 websites
AARP, an American organization for people over age 50, commissioned Ginny Redish and me to give them a scorecard of how well the Web was supporting older people in terms of design. We weren’t to evaluated sites only directed at older adults, but do conduct a broad review of sites that regular people might…
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Tools for plotting a future course of design, checking progress
“Let’s check this against the Nielsen guidelines for intranets,” she said. We were three quarters of the way through completing wireframes for a redesign. We had spent 4 months doing user research, card sorting, prototyping, iterating, and testing (a lot). At the time, going back to the Nielsen Norman Group guidelines seemed like a really…
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Where do heuristics come from?
Recently I had the honor and pleasure of working on a project for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop style guidelines for voting system documentation. Yawner, right? Not at all, it turns out. It made me think about where guidelines and heuristics come from for all kinds of design. Yes, if…
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What are you asking for when you ask for a heuristic evaluation?
Every usability professional I know gets requests to do heuristic evaluations. But it isn’t always clear that the requester actually knows what is involved in doing a heuristic evaluation. Some clients who have asked me to do them have picked up the term “heuristic evaluation” somewhere but often are not clear on the details. Typically,…