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Condé Nast’s proprietary CMS, Copilot, had a lot of UX debt—and much of that debt was a series of heuristic violations. In Q3 2017, my research partner and I conducted the first heuristic analysis on the application.
MY ROLE
One of two heuristic evaluators
PROJECT SQUAD
UX research, Copilot’s product manager, Copilot’s design director, and Copilot’s engineering manager.
PROCESS
My partner and I started by familiarizing our project squad with Jakob Nielsen’s 10 heuristics. We also worked with the squad to create a severity scale, which the team could apply to the heuristics that we found within the app.
Once everyone was on the same page, my partner and I went through each content type and recorded its violations. We then went back to the project squad with a PDF of Copilot screens that highlighted and described them (shown above).
Our evaluation resulted in 111 violations, and we needed a way to make sure they were systematically addressed. So we took a gamification approach, scheduling a two-day workshop and competition (aptly called Make it Work). The heuristics became individual Trello cards, each with their own severity, that small teams of designers and engineers could tackle. The team that fixed the most violations won a prize. Sixty-five of the 111 heuristics were fixed during the workshop, and the Copilot PM added the rest to her team’s backlog.
Aside from the quantity of violations fixed, the workshop was a success because it created an investment in usability heuristics and boosted team morale—the winning team spent their earnings taking everyone out for drinks.