Online Learning Environment Design: A Heuristic Evaluation

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of using a heuristic evaluation to evaluate the quality of and suggest improvements to an online learning environment. The website evaluated in this study is a resilience training website targeting doctoral students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Findings from the heuristics evaluation are shown to provide a baseline of potential human factors issues related to user experience with the website and to suggest some preliminary design recommendations. Implications of utilizing a heuristic evaluation to improve the user-centered design of an online learning environment are further discussed.