Usability Testing Methodology: Effectiveness of Heuristic Evaluation in E-Government Website Development

Software development organizations consist of marketing, project management, development, design, and quality assurance team. It is important for the various teams within the organization to understand the benefits and limitation of incorporating various usability testing methods within the software development life cycle. Some of the reasons for poor usability include effort prioritization conflicts from project management, development and design team. The role of the usability engineer is to get involved as the heuristic evaluator and facilitate the development and design efforts are based on usability principles and at the same time adhering to the project time line. Two of the common usability inspection methods consist of user experience testing and expert review or more commonly known as Heuristic Evaluation (HE). This paper focuses on understanding the effectiveness of HE as a methodology for defect detection. The results show the effectiveness of the HE as a usability testing methodology in capturing defects and prioritizing development and design efforts. The results also reinforce the need for integrating traditional heuristics with modified heuristics customized to the domain or field of the project being tested such as E-Government.