Name: Charu Chandra 

email: charu@ccs.neu.edu


Homework 8 - Heuristic evaluation

Project 7 - Medical research assistant

Negatives:

1) The search results might not be in the language of the user, they could be too technical for the users to understand.

Usability heuristic - Speak the user's language

Severity - major


2) Search button doesn't look like a pushable button

Usability heuristic - Consistency

Severity - major


3) It is not explicit that the results are clickable until you hover over it

Usability heuristic - Feedback

Severity - minor


4) There is no exit from the search page. It simply opens the page in browser and there is no clear way to go back to the search results. It relies on the user's previous knowledge of using the back button.

Usability heuristic - Clearly marked exits

Severity - minor


5) There is no help provided by the system. The system should at least say that the user has to type in the query in the text box with an example for users who have never used a search engine before.

Usability heuristic - Help and documentation

Severity - minor


6) There is unnecessary space wasted at the top

Usability heuristic - Simple and natural dialogue

Severity - cosmetic


7) Spelling of Assistant on the main page

Usability heuristic - Simple and natural dialogue

Severity - cosmetic


8) It should tell the source of the content

Usability heuristic - Feedback

Severity - minor


9) The articles should be well-demarcated to prevent any confusion

Usability heuristic - Feedback

Severity - cosmetic


10) A longer description can be given along with the article stubs

Usability heuristic - Feedback

Severity - minor


11) It gets the result for misspelled words but does not tell the user what did it really search for. For example, if you search for vitmin, ti searches for vitamin but it doesn't tell the user that it did search for vitamin which might not be something user was searching for

Usability heuristic - Feedback

Severity - minor


12) On using back button, the results remain on the screen but the  user looses the keywords that he searched for

Usability heuristic - Feedback

Severity - major


13) There should be some space between text area and search button

Usability heuristic - Simple and natural dialogue

Severity - cosmetic


14) There is a visible gap between search box and suggestion list which might confuse the user

Usability heuristic - Feedback

Severity - minor


Positives:

15) The system looks simple with minimal widgets on screen

Usability heuristic - Simple and natural dialogue

Comment - good


16) The language in interface is simple to understand. The search is capable of taking spelling mistakes. 

Usability heuristic - Speak the user's language

Comment - good


17) The system show the list of possible word when the user starts typing.

Usability heuristic - Minimize user memory load

Comment - good


18) It resembles the familiar search engines.

Usability heuristic - Consistency

Comment - good


19) Errors are prevented by showing possible words while typing the search query.

Usability heuristic - Prevent errors

Comment - good


20) The font is big and easy to read.

Usability heuristic - Simple and natural dialogue

Comment - good