Heuristic Evaluation Techniques for Collaborative Software

Abstract

Heuristic Evaluations are most often conducted to evaluate the usability of a software system's interface. When evaluating collaborative software, however, it is critical to understand not only how well the interface design meets these general standards, but also how well it meets the collaboration needs of users. In order to address this issue, the traditional heuristic evaluation process was modified to assess usability in supporting collaborative behaviors defined in the previously developed Collaboration Evaluation Framework (Klein and Adelman, 2005).We describe the key findings from our heuristic evaluation of the collaborative usability of Groove v3.0, InfoWorkSpace v2.5, and Lotus Sametime. The collaborative usuability of the systems was limited by their common ground preservation, information indentification and notification capabilities.