Real-Time Collaborative Heuristic Review: Meeting the Production Schedule Without Sacrificing Quality

Abstract

Although most heuristic evaluation reports are provided to customers after the entire review process is complete, short production schedules sometimes demand real-time feedback from a heuristic evaluation team. In the past, this type of rapid turnaround has proven to be nearly impossible, but contemporary collaboration tools make real-time feedback a reality. This paper describes the process used by an accessibility evaluation team to provide real-time product feedback to customers. This evaluation team streamlined their current process, turning a highly serialized process into tasks that could be done in parallel by adding new software tools to allow them to work in a collaborative fashion. This improvement enabled rapid feedback to the customer and resulted in a real-time collaborative expert review process that can be used to conduct expert usability or accessibility reviews in any domain.