ABSTRACT
The champion of heuristic evaluation is Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen started with thousands of usability problems and boiled them down to nine categories using factor analysis. He added one more for documentation, and this became the original ten heuristics (see the box for the original list) (Cockton, & Woolrych 2001, 2002). One criticism of these ten-heuristic lists is that they tend to be used to categorize the usability problems that experts find but don't actually prompt finding usability problems (Cockton, & Woolrych 2002, Connell and Hammond, 1990}. This is especially problematic for novice evaluators, who don't necessarily know what to look for in usability evaluation. If the bullets a player is supposed to dodge are too small to be seen and avoided, a novice evaluator is unlikely to find that with Nielsen's heuristics (Nielsen, 1993). Other published lists of heuristics include Shneiderman's (1998) eight golden rules of interface design, Gerhardt-Powals research-based guidelines (1996}, and Kamper's (2002) lead, follow, and get out of the way principles and heuristics.
