Categorical inspection method-structured heuristic evaluation (sHEM)

Abstract

This paper proposes a new type of heuristic evaluation method, called the structured heuristic evaluation method (or sHEM). This is expected to detect more of the usability problems as compared to the conventional heuristic evaluation method introduced by Nielsen (1993, 1995). Based on the comparative study we report the experimental results on the effectiveness of the method. There is a trade-off between the number of the activated usability heuristics in the evaluator's memory and the number of problems to be detected by him/her. Our proposition is to solve this trade-off by introducing the structure into the set of usability heuristics, i.e. by splitting the evaluation session into several sessions, each of which focuses on only the specific aspect of the whole usability heuristics.