Functional-driven heuristic evaluation of administrative portal systems used in institutions of higher education

Usability Evaluation Methods (UEM) are critical to both practitioners and researchers of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community. UEMs are often used to evaluate interface usability, uncover functional problems and bring forth design defects. According to Olson and Moran, UEMs are likely to fall after needs assessment and before beta testing in the software life cycle [1]. UEMs are widespread and commonly used in evaluating interactive systems in industry setting more than in academic institutions.Administrative Portals (AP) used in institutions of higher education has gained very little attention, if any at all - in regards to usability testing. This paper however, will not examine why that is. It will rather focus on discussing a new method that was especially designed for evaluating APs of institutions of higher education. The method is called Functional-Driven Heuristic Evaluation (FDHE) as it expands the boundaries of the traditional usability heuristics to encompass a functional context by combining some of the concepts of a cognitive walkthrough. This paper will provide a quick summary and comparison of the traditional heuristic evaluation method and the cognitive walkthrough. Then explain the theoretical framework of the new FDHE and it benefits.Lastly, the paper will provide a synopsis of future work that is intended to put this new usability evaluation method into the test to validate its claimed benefits and confirm its efficacy.