Understanding Heuristic Evaluations
It’s black Friday and I’m browsing different sites on my phone to see what sales are going on. I come across a site with a pop-up that fills the entire screen and no visible way to get rid of it. Frustrated, I end up leaving the site to shop elsewhere.
Usability refers to how efficiently and effectively it is to use a product as well as accommodate the user’s needs. Usability contains the following elements
Learnability: Is it easy for first-time users to understand and accomplish goals
Efficiency: Can users perform tasks quickly
Memorability: Upon future uses, can users quickly remember its navigation and functionality
Errors: What errors does it make, what is their severity, and can users easily overcome them
Satisfaction: Do users enjoy using it
Poor usability causes users to abandon a product and can end up being extremely costly. Luckily, there are several techniques available that help to improve usability. Two of the most popular techniques are usability testing and heuristic evaluation. Since usability testing seems to be more well-known and understood, I decided to explore heuristic evaluation in this post.
Heuristic evaluation is an assessment of a digital experience or product used as a way to quickly identify any usability problems in the interface that conflict with the best practices. It helps to identify problem areas as well as potential opportunities and can help determine how a product stacks up against the competition and where it sits in the market.
When conducting a heuristic evaluation, it is important to follow certain guidelines to make sure the evaluation goes smoothly.
Clear goals and objectives should be set in determining what is to be achieved. Evaluations are generally done by usability experts, who are generally designers familiar with usability practices. It is best practice to have 3–5 evaluators since having a variety of evaluators will allow for more problems to be found. Experts should be familiarized with the target audience and domain in which the product will be used so they can better align with the user’s perspective.
A set of heuristics should be defined. Heuristics are rule of thumb, usability guidelines. Most commonly used are Jakob Nielsen’s “10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design“ (pictured), but others include:
- Arnie Lund’s “Expert Ratings of Usability Maxims”
- Bruce Tognazzini’s “First Principles of Interaction Design”
- Ben Shneiderman’s “Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design”
Evaluators should individually go through the flows of the product and explore freely during the first round of evaluation, then evaluate whether the usability adheres to the set of heuristics during the second evaluation. Any errors should be recorded along with the problem’s details and recommendations on how to fix them and then prioritized by severity. It’s important to make sure evaluators do not discuss findings with each other until all of the evaluations are finished to ensure the results are unbiased.
Heuristic evaluations are extremely useful due to the fact that they are cheap, can be done quickly, and can find several potential usability issues. They are not a replacement for usability tests, however, as they don’t capture performance, overall UX, or involve the end-user.
