On the Advantages of a Systematic Inspection for Evaluating Hypermedia Usability

It is indubitable that usability inspection of complex hypermedia is still an “art, ” in the that a great deal is left to the skills, experience, and ability of the inspectors. inspectors is difficult and often quite expensive. The Systematic Usability (SUE) inspection technique has been proposed to help usability inspectors and transfer their evaluation know-how, to simplify the hypermedia inspection for newcomers, and to achieve more effective and efficient evaluation results. inspection is based on the use of evaluation patterns, called abstract tasks, which describe the activities to be performed by evaluators during inspection. This highlights the advantages of this inspection technique by presenting its empirical through a controlled experiment. Two groups of novice inspectors were to evaluate a commercial hypermedia CD-ROM by applying the SUE inspection traditional heuristic evaluation. The comparison was based on three major dimensions: , efficiency, and satisfaction. Results indicate a clear advantage of SUE inspection over the traditional inspection on all dimensions, demonstrating abstract tasks are efficient tools to drive the evaluator’s performance.