Usability Pattern Identification through Heuristic Walkthroughs

Patterns are a popular means to document design knowledge in different fields of application, including HCI. Accordingly, a large number of different HCI pattern formats have been suggested. However, relatively little is said about how to systematically identify such patterns. In order to make the process of identifying patterns more transparent and comprehensible, I apply a usability inspection method to generate data that can be used as input for the systematic creation of usability patterns. This article describes the basic idea of identifying usability patterns through a series of heuristic walkthroughs and illustrates the approach by means of a case study in the field of “linguistic annotation tools”