Loughborough University
Browse
HCII 2018 paper Maguire final.pdf (167.12 kB)

A comparison of user testing and heuristic evaluation methods for identifying website usability problems

Download (167.12 kB)
conference contribution
posted on 2018-12-18, 15:15 authored by Martin MaguireMartin Maguire, Paul Isherwood
This study compared the effectiveness and efficiency of two usability testing methods, user testing and heuristic evaluation. Thirty two participants took part in the study, sixteen for each of the two methods. Four measures were used to compare their performance: number of problems identified, severity of problems, type of problems and time taken to find problems. It was found that heuristic evaluation found nearly 5 times more individual problems than user testing, so could be seen as more effective. However, user testing found on average slightly more severe problems and took less time to complete than heuristic evaluation. Heuristic evaluation had a faster problem identification rate (number of seconds per problem found), so could also be seen as more efficient. While each method had advantages in the test both methods are seen as complementary to each other in practice.

History

School

  • Design

Published in

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Volume

10918 LNCS

Pages

429 - 438

Citation

MAGUIRE, M. and ISHERWOOD, P., 2018. A comparison of user testing and heuristic evaluation methods for identifying website usability problems. IN: Marcus A. and Wang W. (eds). Design, User Experience, and Usability: Theory and Practice (DUXU 2018), Las Vegas, NV, USA, 15-20 July 2018, Part I, pp.429-438.

Publisher

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2018

Notes

This is a pre-copyedited version of a contribution published in Marcus A. and Wang W. (eds). Design, User Experience, and Usability: Theory and Practice (DUXU 2018),published by Springer The definitive authenticated version is available online via https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91797-9_31

ISBN

9783319917962

ISSN

0302-9743

Book series

Lecture Notes in Computer Science;10918

Language

  • en

Usage metrics

    Loughborough Publications

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC