Toward Building Self-Sustaining Groups in PCR-Based Tasks Through Implicit Coordination : The Case of Heuristic Evaluation

Usability flaws found in the later stages of the development process can be extremely costly to resolve. Accordingly, usability evaluation (UE) is an important, albeit expensive, part of software development. We report on how the inexpensive usability evaluation method of heuristic evaluation (HE) can benefit from collaborative software, implicit coordination, and principles from collaboration engineering. In our study, 439 novice participants were trained in HE methods and then performed HE. Our results show that traditional nominal HE groups can experience implicit coordination from the collaborative software features of group memory and group awareness. One of the key results is that collaborative software (CSW) groups had fewer duplicates than traditional nominal groups, which differences were magnified in going from groups of three to groups of six members. Furthermore, because of less coordination, traditional nominal groups had a lot more work to perform in the overall process of HE. We attribute the reduction in duplication for CSW-supported groups to the implicit coordination available to CSW-supported groups who could see violations typed by other group members but could not directly discuss the violations. These findings not only show the power of implicit coordination in groups, but should dramatically change how HE is conducted. These results may also extend to other evaluation tasks, such as software inspection and usability assessment tasks