KArm - Interface evaluation based on Neilsen's usability Heuristics.
The Karm which is the focus of this evaluation was written by Sirtaj Singh Kang. Karm tracks time spent on various tasks it is useful for tracking hours to be billed to different clients or just to find out that what percentage of time you spent on performing different tasks in a day.
In the following report we will identify usability problems and disciplines that exist in Karm and as well as suggest improvements. Karm is a software with a very limited functionality .
The method I used for evaluating was that going through each heuristic and reporting that how well karm stands . This report is divided into 10 parts where each part deals with each of the 10 Neilsens heuristics in context with karm in details. .
The main findings of this report have been that Karm .
The Report.
As far as the "Simple and Natural dialogues" are concerned, karm has a very simple interface with very few dialogues on it and there is nothing complex in the interface In the case of Navigation I did found some difficulty in locating the label "this session" which is located at bottom right corner of the karm main window. Presentation is simple and natural but when initializing karm an irrelevant window comes up which has absolutely no use at all.
For the second heuristic "Speak the users language", karm has both negative and positive points. The language, words and phrases (i.e. Start, Stop, Delete etc.) used in the dialogues of karm are very familiar to all kind of users and makes the information appear in natural and logical order. But it seems like karm could not catch up with the "Domain Specifics" because of its incapability of supporting other international languages. Also all the icons other than "New Task" are quite easy to understand.
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Minimizing memory techniques.
Be Consistent .
Being consistent is a huge factor in the interface usability evaluation.