Lexos Heuristic Review
Kleinman, S., LeBlanc, M.D., Drout, M., and Zhang, C. (2019). Lexos v3.2.0. https://github.com/WheatonCS/Lexos/
I Worked in a team of 3 design students to conduct a heuristic review of Lexos - a text analysis software developed at Wheaton College. Our team conducted this review and presented our findings to a developer team for future platform updates
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I tested out each feature on the Lexos platform without using any of the provided guidance or tutorials, like a newbie with no prior experience or exposure to the program, and made notes while using the platform. The team and I then worked to combine our observations to bring to the developer team on an informal basis.
I refreshed myself on Neilsen Norman Group’s 10 Usability Heuristics to apply our observations about the Lexos software. We worked together in Miro to assign each of our observations to the list of heuristics. The team mainly noticed issues with error prevention and recovery, help documentation, visibility of system status, and match between the system and the real world. Then we sorted our evaluations by priority for the developing team to make future updates
I then took screenshots of areas where the issues we found in the system and marked up the screenshots with the errors/issues that occur and where they happen. We then edited the text to clearly explain the issue and a proposed fix/alternative that was sent to the developing team. Before shipping a document to the developing team.
The team gave a brief five-minute presentation to our peers within the studio about the work we did with Lexos. We talked about what the platform does, provided a small introduction to heuristics, and presented our final PDF Document to talk through some of the recommendations/findings and why they are important/impactful.