uzReview Documentation

What is heuristic review?

Heuristic review is a process for inspecting software according to a small set of empirically validated guidelines. For an explanation of how these principles apply to the web, visit Site Usability Heuristics for the Web

Table of Contents

Uzilla Review Documentation.



Uzilla Review (uzReview) is a tool for heuristic evaluation of web-based user interfaces.

Getting Started:

To begin, select Window -> uzReview to display the uzReview sidebar. You can toggle the sidebar on and off with F8.

If you are starting a new project, enter the project name and your email address into the form at the bottom of the sidebar and click "Start Review." Next, select either the keyword or url mode, described in the Conducting a review section.

If you are resuming a previous project, select the project and then click "Launch Review."

Modes: Running and Viewing.

Conducting a review

There are two key modes in the review process, keyword and url. The url mode is for logging heuristics based upon the current page. Keyword mode is for workflows and allows you to group a set of comments across a set of pages.

You can switch between keyword and url mode at any time, logging against the page in both modes.

URL mode

In URL mode, your evaluations are automatically recorded with each page change. If no heuristics were logged, no record of the page visit is made in the log.

Keyword mode

In keyword mode, every page visited is logged into the heuristic-result file, even if you don't log evaluations on each page. This is useful for evaluating workflows like a checkout or reservatino process.
Usage Scenario

Continuing a Review

Reviews may be continued, click on the project name in the existing projects list and then click the "Launch Review" button. You can also revisit the focus of any logged comments by clicking on the "browse" button from running mode and selecting the focus from the available panels.


Working with Results

The results of a uzReview are stored in XML in the projects folder [-]. From this XML file, uzReview will generate an HTML report.

You may choose to review your heuristic evaluation by Location/Keyword, or by the heuristic it was logged against.

Report View

To begin select an existing project from the list and click "Launch Review"

By Location/Keyword

This is a list of the urls that were given a severity ranking or that comments were inserted in the list of heuristics.

Clicking on a url will display the rankings and comments for that page, which will be displayed in the right hand pane.

Click the "Browse" button to return to the list of urls.

By Heuristic

Click on the  'By Heuristic" tab, just below the project title.

This is a list of all the heuristics that were given a severity ranking or a comment. It provides a quick look at which heuristics are most commonly being violated.

Clicking on the heuristic will display the ranking or comment with the page that it applies to in the right hand pane.

Click the "Browse" button to return to the list of heuristics.

By "View Report" button

This page provides an overview of the heuristic evaluation with the number of pages visited, and the number of heuristics violated.  It also lists the top problems by heuristics and also by url. 

Then for each url the report displays the heuristic, its severity ranking and comments that were logged for or against the heuristic.


Advanced Usage Scenarios

Customizing the heuristics

The heuristics presented are defined in your mozilla folder in the path chrome/uzreview/content/heuristics/heuristics.xml. In a future release, you will be able to maintain multiple heuristic files in this directory.

Using other browser windows

If you wish to browse sites other than the current review, use a separate window. It is also possible to conduct two reviews at the same time in separate windows.

Tabbed Browsing

Each tab in a tabbed-browsing session is available to uzReview when it is in focus. This may disrupt your ability to follow pageflows in keyword tagged reviews as the navigations between tabs will be recorded in your trail.
Please file RFE's at mozdev.

Known Issues