Quality Assurance for Interactive Systems

Course Code: UXD 5004

Academic Year: 2024-2025

In this course students will gain familiarity with both heuristic and walk-through methods and compare the outcomes for re-designing interactive systems. Heuristic evaluation uses a small set of rules for making digital interaction patterns easier for people to use and experience. While this method of research can be used at the outset of a project or audit the quality of a design, it is more commonly applied as an approach to quality control prior to product launch. The cognitive walkthrough offers an alternative method for quality control that is used for refinement. Rather than listing rules in advance of testing, a walkthrough invites a sample of users to 'think aloud' when completing a set of micro-tasks within a software environment. The latter approach is more likely to uncover assumptions that a design team has made which feel unnatural or unpleasant to people from the user community.