WWW interface Design, Driven by Heuristic Evaluation: the EINS-Web Project

This paper describes the experience of the evaluation and design of the EINS-Web user interface. EINS-Web allows the access to distributed collections of bibliographic and textual databases, together with a seamless interaction with the whole World Wide Web on Internet. The heuristic evaluation of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) was run in two steps. The results of the evaluation of the first version of the GUI were used to drive the design of the Web version. This paper describes the methodology used and the lessons learned. The interaction among evaluators and designers proved to improve the success of a spiral design methodology, which is needed to cope with the requirements of designing interfaces targeted at the rapidly evolving Internet world.