Content audits enable you to the following:

• Assess whether the content supports business and user goals
• Identify whether content consistently follow design, editorial, style and metadata guidelines
• Establish a basis for analyzing the gap between the content you have the content you need
• Identify content for revision, removal, and migration

A content audit answers the questions:

• How do we define good content?
• How can we test content against that definition?
• What decisions can we make with the findings?

Source: Land, Paula Landberg. Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook for Content Analysis. 2 edition. Denver, CO, USA: XML Press, May 2023.

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1. Create User Story Maps:
   • Develop a user story map that provides a visual representation of the user’s journey through the product.
   • Arrange user stories in a logical order to show the flow of tasks and activities.
2. Prioritise User Stories with the Product Owner and Other Stakeholders:
   • Prioritise user stories based on their impact on the user experience and business goals.
   • Assign priorities to each user story to guide development efforts.
   • Important: Do this with the Product owners, but ideally with other project stakeholders and other departments.
3. Define Acceptance Criteria:
   • Clearly define acceptance criteria for each user story. This includes the conditions that must be met for the story to be considered complete.
   • Use acceptance criteria to set expectations and ensure the design meets the required standards.
4. Use Prototypes and Wireframes and Make Sure Developers Understand Them Through Clarification Sessions:
   • Attach links or images of prototypes to corresponding user stories to provide a clear visual reference.
   • Make sure you add annotations to provide additional context about interactions, visual elements, and behaviour.
   • Most importantly, have clarification sessions with the development team to make sure there are no ambiguities and they can implement what is desired correctly.
5. Utilise Design Systems:
   • Implement and reference design systems to maintain consistency across user interfaces.
   • Ensure that design system components are linked to corresponding user stories.
6. Update Stories as Needed:
   • Regularly update user stories to reflect changes in design or requirements.
   • Use version control or annotation tools to track modifications and keep stakeholders informed.
7. Include Usability Test Findings:
   • Integrate usability test findings into user stories.
   • Clearly communicate insights from usability testing to developers to inform design adjustments.
8. Use Agile Tools:
   • Leverage agile project management tools such as Jira, Microsoft Azure Boards, Trello or Asana to manage and track user stories.
   • Ensure that the UX team has visibility into the development process and can make adjustments as needed.
9. Conduct Regular Reviews:
   • Schedule regular reviews and walkthroughs of user stories with the development team.
   • Encourage feedback and address any questions or concerns promptly.
10. Measure User Satisfaction:
    • Consider incorporating metrics for user satisfaction, such as SUS (System Usability Scale), PSSQU (Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and track improvements over time.
    • Use feedback loops to continuously refine and enhance the user experience.

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1. Open up System Settings.
2. Click Accessibility in the left-hand menu.
3. On the right-hand side of the Accessibility menu, select Use trackpad gesture to zoom.

Viola! You’re done. Now you’re back in the Figma fast lane.

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Brief Description of the Walkthrough Process

The Cognitive Walkthrough has the same basic organization and rationale as other types of design walkthrough, such as requirements walkthroughs and code walkthroughs (Yourdon, 1989). It is a review process in which the author of one aspect of a design presents a proposed design to a group of peers. The peers then evaluate the solution using criteria appropriate to the design issues.

In the Cognitive Walkthrough, the reviewers evaluate a proposed interface in the context of one or more specific user tasks. The input to a Walkthrough session includes an interface’s detailed design description (perhaps in the form of a paper mockup or a working prototype), a task scenario, explicit assumptions about the user population and the context of use, and a sequence of actions that a user should successfully perform to complete the designated task.

Overview of the Cognitive Walkthrough Process

1. Define inputs to the walkthrough
   1. Who the users are
   2. Sample tasks for evaluation
   3. Action sequences for completing the tasks
   4. Description or implementation of the interface
2. Convene the analysts
3. Walk through the action sequences for each task
   1. Tell a credible story, considering…
      1. Will the user try to achieve right effect?
      2. Will the user notice that the correct action is available?
      3. Will the user associate the correct action with the effect they are trying to achieve?
      4. If the correct action is performed, will the user see that progress is being made toward solution of their task?
4. Record Critical Information
   1. User knowledge requirements
   2. Assumptions about the user population
   3. Notes about side issues and design changes
   4. The credible success story
5. Define inputs to the walkthrough

During the Walkthrough process the group considers, in sequence, each of the user actions needed to accomplish the task. For each action, the analysts try to tell a story about a typical user’s interaction with the interface. They ask what the user would be trying to do at this point and what actions the interface makes available. If the interface design is a good one, the user’s intentions should cause him or her to select the appropriate action. Following the action, the interface should present clear feedback indicating that progress is being made toward completing the task.

Source: Nielsen, Jakob and Robert L. Mack. Usability Inspection Methods. 1 edition. New York, NY, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., April 1994. 105-106.

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An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization. The term is borrowed from philosophy, where an ontology is a systematic account of existence. For knowledge-based systems, what “exists” is exactly that which can be represented.

Source: Gruber, T.R. 1993. A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specification. Knowledge Acquisition 5: 199-220. http://tomgruber.org/writing/ontolingua-kaj-1993.pdf

Cone Trees note

The word Ontology comes from two Greek words- ‘Onto’ which means existence and ‘Logia’ which means science. The semantic web can be considered as a light weight ontology.

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The terms human factors and ergonomics are closely associated with engineering psychology, the study of human performance in the operation of systems. Human factors psychologists and engineers are concerned with anything that affects the performance of system operators—whether hardware, software, or liveware. They are involved both in the study and application of principles of ergonomic design to equipment and operating procedures and in the scientific selection and training of operators.

The goal of ergonomics is to optimize machine design for human operation, and the goal of selection and training is to produce people who get the best performance possible within machine design limitations.

Human factors specialists are concerned first with the distribution of system functions among people and machines. System functions are identified through the analysis of system operations. Human factors analysts typically work backward from the goal or desired output of the system to determine the conditions that must be satisfied if the goal is to be achieved. Next they predict—on the basis of relevant, validated theory or actual experimentation with simulated systems—whether the functions associated with each subgoal can be satisfied more reliably and economically with automation or human participation.

Source: Proctor, R. & Vu, K. Handbook of Human Factors in Web Design, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, 2005. 3.

Related:

Ergonomics

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Ergonomics (or Human Factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimise human well-being and overall system performance.

Ergonomists contribute to the design and evaluation of tasks, jobs, products, environments and systems in order to make them compatible with the needs, abilities and limitations of people.

Source: https://iea.cc/what-is-ergonomics/

Related

Human Factors

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Summary
Heuristic evaluations and expert review have the same goal- to evaluate the usability of the product. While the goal of these usability evaluation methods is the same, the methods are different.

It is common to hear people people using these terms interchangeably. An expert review is termed as a heuristic evaluation when in actuality the evaluators evaluated the usability of the product referring to their own knowledge of right and wrong rather than explicitly referencing against a set of heuristics.

This article explains the difference between a Heuristic Evaluation and an Expert Review and tells you when to apply which method.

What is a Heuristic Evaluation?

A heuristic evaluation is the evaluation of the usability of a product against a set of heuristics. Issues are found and reported and recommendations are made explicitly referencing this set of heuristics.

What is an Expert Review?

An expert review is the evaluation of the usability of a product by an expert in the usability domain and preferably in the domain the product applies to. An expert may or may not directly refer to a set of heuristics during the evaluation and while reporting issues and recommendations. Besides this, an expert will evaluate the usability of the product against what the expert has learned throughout their experience of working on usability of products- through data yielded on their own or accessed from existing research.

When to Use a Heuristic Evaluation and When to Use an Expert Review?

It would be safe to say that higher the expertise of the evaluator performing a heuristic evaluation or an expert review, the higher are your chances of yielding useful results. Also, an expert review will yield better results as compared to a heuristic evaluation when performed by experts since this incorporates knowledge about the domain and their own experience which in most cases may go beyond what a set of heuristics might help one find.

However, in the case a usability evaluation has to be done by a group of evaluators that do not have much experience in usability or the domain the product applies to, a heuristic evaluation will have higher chances of yielding better results than an expert review, since these evaluators will have a set of heuristics (rules of thumb) to refer to, as opposed to utilizing their own experience to make judgments which in this case will be very limited and may yield a considerable number of ‘false alarms’.

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Currently over 30 terms.

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Free

1. Weft QDA
2. CASOS AutoMap

Paid

1. Nvivo
2. ATLAS.ti
3. MAXQDA
4. Dedoose
5. Provalis QDA miner
6. Leximancer
7. Aurelius
8. Dovetail

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