For the sake of clarity, part of week two will be covered in this post, as our heuristics ran over into week two. There will still be a week 2 recap as we move onto competitive research and other tasks, but some heuristic tasks that happened in week 2 will be discussed here.
Getting Started
In the first week of the project, we hit the ground running. My team is comprised of me (Rob), Mara, Hanley, Harry, and Max. We identified our strengths and weaknesses. If I take a step back and analyse my strengths and weaknesses, I generally believe that I’m a well-rounded designer with competency across different disciplines of UX. However, in our team, we had a few members who were better than myself at certain tasks, with the exception of my prototyping and Figma software skills, which I am most confident in. However, as they would not be relevant at the start of this project, I was happy for my role to be that of supporting the team members where I could before we moved on to Figma/prototyping in the middle to end stages.
Familiarising with the Virgin Wines Website
The first week was all hands on deck. We decided it was important for all of us to get familiar with the Virgin Wines website so we would all be on the same page. This meant we all did a heuristic mark-up and analysis of the site. Below is an example of one of my mark-ups compared to a team member’s. I only include this to show the difference in styles, which I found quite comedic. I wish my mark-ups were as clean as others.
I always find working on my iPad for mark-ups is easier and faster. Also, for my own brain, I find it hard to always understand what each Post-it note means, but when working with a pen, you can really identify what and where these problems lie.
Detailed Heuristic Evaluation
After doing a mark-up of every page and flow, we took different page flows for a more detailed heuristic evaluation. The flow I focused on was the events page desktop. A big consideration I’m making stepping into this group project is to be able to work in a group efficiently. It’s something I noticed in last term’s project while going to the user story for a taster day: how do I work in the industry? Is there a way I can change my workflow to better hand-off when it is needed? I made attempts at this with Project 5 by learning how to lay out a Figma file and working with components and basic design systems so if someone needed to take over, they could at any point. This is to say that this group project was the first chance I’d have to practice these skills. Applying them to research was a skill I wanted to gain.
While studying, I found the Nielsen Norman Group guide to heuristic evaluation. They laid out their findings in the above figure style, which I found to be very helpful. I attempted to make the same for my own heuristic evaluation so it can be best handed off to anyone looking at it.
A con to evaluating this way was that it took considerably longer than my peers who were just evaluating with post-its. I think this is a good method for showing other people as it directly shows what is a problem and how to fix it. Because of the nature of the brief and that we’re going to redesign the whole site, this approach was incorrect. It took too long to do this, and as most of the problems were going to be scrapped anyway since the whole design was getting changed, it was inappropriate to take this approach. I think this sort of documented approach would work best when auditing a site or making smaller changes to fix a site rather than a redesign. This time would be better-spent testing, I believe.
Collating Findings
After mark-ups and evaluation, we all worked together to collate our findings into real-life post-it notes as seen above. We could have done this in Miro; however, we decided to work in person as we wanted to build some group cohesion. We split the notes into groups for each flow and identified the categories they belong in. After this, we put the notes up on a Miro board. I then grouped them into their respective categories and the main problems of each page. I made opportunity solutions for each page. This was done so as a group we could see our research quickly, as it felt we were moving on without regard to the research we had done. This is the end of the heuristics.
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