Neilsen
In recent years, we have seen an explosion of interest in development for mobile devices and tablets. Many companies have mobile websites and mobile applications, but how do you make sure that these applications are easy to use and satisfy your customers’ needs? The best way to do it is to test your mobile designs with real users.Source: http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/mobile_user_research.html
Heuristic Evaluation
Neilsen
Heuristic evaluation is the most popular of the usability inspection methods. Heuristic evaluation is done as a systematic inspection of a user interface design for usability. The goal of heuristic evaluation is to find the usability problems in the design so that they can be attended to as part of an iterative design process.Source: http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/
Nielsen developed the heuristic criteria which user tests can test against to evaluate the performance of their interface design. They are as follows:
- Visibility of system status
- Match between system and the real world
- User control and freedom
- Consistency and standards
- Error prevention
- Recognition rather than recall
- Flexibility and efficiency of use
- Aesthetic and minimalist design
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
- Help and documentation
I since refined the heuristics based on a factor analysis of 249 usability problems [Nielsen 1994a] to derive a set of heuristics with maximum explanatory power, resulting in this revised set of heuristics [Nielsen 1994b].Source: http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html