screenshot: redish.net
Caroline Jarrett told at usabilitynews.com about the idea of Ginny Redish to improve heuristic inspection. Ginny Redish used personas for heuristic inspection:
“Ginny (Redish) introduced us to a new method of doing heuristic inspection that she has developed with Dana Chisnell. They’d done a lot of usability testing for AARP, the USA organisation for people over 60. (…)
But this time, AARP wanted a review of 50 sites, and they wanted it in time scales that made it impossible to run enough usability tests. So Ginny and Dana turned to personas for inspiration. Fortunately, AARP had a thoroughly-researched set of personas that described key segments of their audience. So Ginny and Dana chose two of them, and then visited the selected sites from the point of view of each of the personas.
They reviewed each site as one of the personas, and took notes as if the persona had performed a ‘think aloud’ commentary on it. (…)
Ginny explained that their method applies the heuristics more intensively than a simple check-list approach would do. ‘Sometimes we found that some pages in a website did pretty well on a heuristic, while other pages did poorly. If you just looked at a couple of pages in the site to see if it conformed, you’d miss the issues.’
She also confirmed that usability testing is still her preferred technique. ‘But if you need to get a lot of data quickly, then this is one way to get a start on it.'”
related links
Redish.net
Article @ usabilitynews.com
