Usability testing techniques: a process for group evaluations

Usability efforts for Intel Branded Products, until recently, consisted of user testing of completed products. Now, for software products, we are able to incorporate usability evaluations earlier into the development process. We do this by role playing from the user perspective, what we call heuristic walk-throughs. The feedback we get from these tests benefits the interface design, and the process itself promotes communication among developers. One major challenge has been getting the best possible makeup of the evaluators participating in the tests. We compare the feedback and makeup of four separate heuristic walk-through evaluations