Usability Heuristics Evaluation in Search Engine

Network growth through recent years reveals our continuous search for information. With the urge of consuming information, search engine popularity rises, becoming our browser’s primary function when typing in the navigation bar. The increasing information volume amplifies the demands of search refining with emphasizes on the concern about presenting data correctly and delivering answers to the users successfully. This paper presents a usability evaluation in the Brazilian Federal Court of Accounts (Tribunal de Contas da Uniao - TCU) search engine for official documents. The need to update and centralize the search engines arised with the increasing technology quality in recent years. Despite good functionalities already implemented, the outdated interfaces with no common standards would no longer fit in today’s use. The urge to create a pattern in TCU systems brought the idea of centralizing different types of documents in only one search engine. Applying the inspection method proposed by Nielsen’s [1], it was possible to gather issues that were neglected in the development process. The results were outstanding: 49 issues found in a product that had already been released. Expecting user’s feedback to correct a software product is far from ideal, making necessary to apply inspection methods in evaluating the system’s usability. Severity ratings were applied in the inspection method, in order to categorize the issues and sort their solutions priorities. By summarizing their frequency, impact and persistence to rates, it was possible to combine those rates in a single severity rate, assigned to each issue. The work reported in this paper made possible the correction of several usability errors occurring in the system. Being a wide project, the amount of issues found, though seemed a large number, are proportionally not so huge: approximately one issue per screen is an acceptable result. The limitations of the studies were related to the amount of specialists involved, although the results indicate that a small group of evaluators is sufficient, specially when the projects, despite having many screens, has a lot of replicated components, where screens are not the same, but reuses interfaces modules. The contribution is primarily internal, by assisting in the deliver of a better product. But the study and reporting used in this paper allowed the authors to summarize the benefits of the heuristic inspection method, presenting the results in a real context, with explicit numbers and categorizing.