The document discusses various methods for inspecting products for usability, including heuristic evaluation, heuristic estimation, cognitive walkthrough, pluralistic walkthrough, feature inspection, consistency inspection, standards inspection, and formal usability inspection. Heuristic evaluation involves usability specialists evaluating a product's dialog elements against usability "heuristics." Cognitive walkthrough simulates how a user would solve problems by stepping through each dialog step. Pluralistic walkthrough involves users, developers, and human factors experts discussing each dialog element. Formal usability inspection combines individual and group inspections using a structured six-step process.

1. Is your product user-centric?Inspection methods

2. Available methodsHeuristic evaluation Heuristic estimationCognitive walkthroughPluralistic walkthroughFeature inspectionConsistency inspection Standards inspectionFormal usability inspection

3. Heuristic evaluationmost informal methodusability specialists make sure each dialogue element follows the “heuristics”

4. Heuristic estimationrelative usability of two (or more) designsquantitative terms (typically expected user performance)

5. Cognitive walkthroughsimulate a user’s problem-solving processeach step through the dialoguecheck if predicted process correctly

6. Pluralistic walkthroughusers, developers, and human factors peoplestep through use casediscuss each dialog element involved

7. Feature inspectionlist features required for a use casechecks for long sequences, cumbersome steps, steps that would not be natural for users to try, and steps that require extensive knowledge/experience

8. Consistency inspection designers from other projectsmake sure its consistent with their own design

9. Standards inspectionan expert on an interface standard inspect the interface for compliance.

10. Formal usability inspectioncombines individual and group inspectionssix-step procedure with strictly defined rolesheuristic evaluation + cognitive walkthrough.

11. More informationhttp://www.useit.com/jakob/inspectbook.htmlhttp://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/inspection_summary.html