User Experience Heuristics Review

As part of OpenText's "experience is everything" initiative, the usability and overall user experience of the company's software products are getting more attention.  To this end, the UX team was asked to create a set of heuristics against which sub-sets of a project or an entire release could be evaluated.  I was fortunate enough to be asked to sit in on the review in the Austin office along with members of two product engineering teams.  The goal of these heuristics is to provide specifics on how to make things better and should be seen as a yardstick for best practices. The workbook we reviewed was very thorough and provided guidelines in 16 areas:

1. Task efficiency
2. Control
3. Guidance
4. Accessibility
5. Feedback
6. Interaction
7. User Input
8. Validation
9. System State
10. Layout
11. Appearance
12. Text
13. Messages
14. Consistency
15. OS and Browser
16. Mobile

It was interesting to hear the feedback from the product teams; overall reactions were positive but it was clear there were some areas that still needed to be addressed.  One particular area of stickiness for both product teams is the issue of localization and creating flexible designs that allow for more and often wider or longer text, labels and system controls in languages other than English, though English is the primary interface language used during development.  I am interested to see how this gets addressed going forward.