Adapting the Locales Framework for Heuristic Evaluation of Groupware
Date
1999-08-11
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Heuristic evaluation is a rapid, cheap and effective way for
identifying usability problems in single user systems. However, current
heuristics do not provide guidance for discovering problems specific to
groupware usability. In this paper, we take the Locales Framework and restate
it as heuristics appropriate for evaluating groupware. These are: 1) Provide
locales; 2) Provide awareness within locales; 3) Allow individual views; 4)
Allow people to manage and stay aware of their evolving interactions; 5)
Provide a way to organize and relate locales to one another. To see if these
new heuristics are useful in practise, we used them to inspect the interface
of Teamwave Workplace, a commercial groupware product. We were successful at
identifying the strengths of Teamwave as well as both major and minor
interface problems.
Description
Keywords
Computer Science