Heuristic Evaluation

Please note: This content reflects industry best practices. We’ve provided links to third-party resources where appropriate.

What It Is

A heuristic evaluation measures a product’s usability against a set of predetermined qualitative design guidelines, also known as heuristics. It’s a quick, inexpensive way to gather feedback. It can reduce trivial usability issues, leading to improved consistency and ease of use, and reducing noise for future usability testing with users.

A heuristic evaluation is different from any other usability testing because the people who do the analysis inspect the interface instead of using it. There’s no user testing involved, so a heuristic evaluation may not cover all use cases of a product for a particular group of target users.

There are more than 200 criteria that can be used for evaluation, but we use a set of heuristics based on Jacob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design:

Visibility of system status
Match between system and the real world
User control and freedom
Consistency and standards
Error prevention
Recognition rather than recall
Flexibility and efficiency of use
Aesthetic and minimalist design
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Help and documentation

When To Use It

You’re creating a new product or application.
There are resources and/or time constraints, but you want to make basic usability improvements.
Before conducting usability testing and/or customer research.

How It Works

Duration of test: 30 to 60 minutes, depending on the extent of testing

Suggested number of participants: 2 or 3 reviewers

Steps:

Develop a research plan.
Conduct the assessment using the heuristics evaluation checklist, which assigns a severity rating to each usability issue.
Add the identified issues to the backlog for product teams to address.

Note: UX designers start with the most critical issues on the backlog. Issues with the highest severity rating get the most attention.

Outcomes

A heuristics evaluation report
Issues for backlog

Resources