A Process for Incorporating Heuristic Evaluation into a Software Release

Abstract
This paper describes a process for incorporating heuristic evaluations into a software product release. The goal of the paper is to provide enough detail and results to other design teams to assist them in developing their own process for this activity.

The process took place over approximately one year. In all, 124 projects were reviewed, involving 1414 web pages, and identifying 5817 defects. Data is not yet available about the exact number of defects fixed, but it is expected to be well over 2000, as described below.

The heuristics used in this process included how well the various pages integrated, how easy it was to accomplish tasks, conformance to style guidelines, and consistency in design, terminology, and layout. Some user testing was done on some of the projects that went through these reviews; the reviews complimented that testing.

Keywords
Design Methods, Process Improvement, Product Design, Usability Research, Usability Testing and Evaluation, User Interface Design

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First presented at the conference on Designing for User eXperience, November 3-5, 2005, San Francisco, CA