Erika Hall

Don’t just test your own product—test the competitor’s! You can use task-based usability testing (described in Chapter 7) to evaluate a competitor’s website or application

The numbers will tell you what’s going on, and the individual people will help you understand why it’s happening.

Evaluation is assessing the merit of your design. It’s the research you never stop doing. There are several ways to go about it, depending on where you are in the project

In the early stages, evaluation takes the form of heuristic analysis and usability testing

Once a site or application is live, even if it’s in private alpha, you can start looking at quantitative data and use site analytics to see how people are actually interacting with the system and whether that meets your expectations

combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.

“Heuristic” in English simply means “based on experience”; a heuristic is a qualitative guideline, an accepted principle of usability.

individually go through a site or application with a checklist

System status visibility. The system should provide appropriate feedback.
Match between system and real world. Use language familiar to the user and follow conventions.
User control and freedom. Provide emergency exits, undo, and redo.
Consistency and standards. Things that appear the same should behave the same.
Error prevention. Don’t just let users escape from errors: help users avoid them.
Recognition rather than recall. Options should be visible. Instructions should be easy to find. Don’t make the user have to remember information.
Flexibility and efficiency of use. Support shortcuts for expert

Aesthetic and minimalist design. Avoid providing irrelevant information.
Help users recognize and recover from errors. Error messages should be helpful.
Help and documentation. Ideally, the system should be usable without documentation, but help should still be available and task oriented.