On the advantages of a systematic inspection for evaluating hypermedia usability

It is indubitable that usability inspection of complex hypermedia is still an "art," in the sense that a great deal is left to the skills, experience, and ability of the inspectors. Training inspectors is difficult and often quite expensive. The Systematic Usability Evaluation (SUE) inspection technique has been proposed to help usability inspectors share and transfer their evaluation know-how, to simplify the hypermedia inspection process for newcomers, and to achieve more effective and efficient evaluation results. SUE inspection is based on the use of evaluation patterns, called abstract tasks, which precisely describe the activities to be performed by evaluators during inspection. This article highlights the advantages of this inspection technique by presenting its empirical validation through a controlled experiment. Two groups of novice inspectors were asked to evaluate a commercial hypermedia CD-ROM by applying the SUE inspection or traditional heuristic evaluation. The comparison was based on three major dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Results indicate a clear advantage of the SUE inspection over the traditional inspection on all dimensions, demonstrating that abstract tasks are efficient tools to drive the evaluator's performance.