Everything you need to know about Heuristic Evaluation- Part 2

In part 1, we learned what heuristic evaluation is and looked at the ten design principles or heuristics shared by Jakob Nielsen, along with their examples. In part 2 of this article series, we will discuss the pros and cons of heuristics evaluation and dig further into why, when, and how to conduct a heuristic evaluation.

Pros of Heuristic Evaluation

1. Heuristic Evaluation helps uncover numerous usability issues and eventually enhances a product’s UX remarkably.

2. Following Nielsen’s heuristics to evaluate designs can assist designers to find usability problems with specific user flows and their impact on the overall UX.

3. Heuristic Analysis doesn’t involve ethical and practical complications linked with evaluation methods involving real users.

4. Evaluators can focus on specific problems such as lack of system feedback, error prevention, poor discoverability, etc.

5. Cost-effective and quicker than full-blown usability tests that ask for executing tests, recording, analyzing, etc. Also, you can merge different usability testing methods at the same time.

Cons of Heuristic Evaluation

1. Experienced evaluators or Usability experts are not easy to find and may strike an expensive deal.

2. If wrong heuristics are implemented, it is likely that certain usability problems would be overlooked. Therefore, it’s important to pick the relevant heuristics.

3. Heuristic evaluation might also ring false alarms; creating unnecessary issues that wouldn’t have any effect on the UX had it not been touched.

4. Issues discovered are usually restricted to the skill and experience of the evaluator.

Why conduct Heuristic Evaluation?

The advantages highlighted above offer clear insights into why one should perform heuristic analysis. Nevertheless, as we mentioned earlier, the primary reason to conduct a heuristic evaluation is to improve a digital product’s usability that involves many quality factors such as learnability, flexibility, discoverability, error-handling capability, memorability, and user satisfaction. When all these factors are well-delivered, a product’s UX is significantly improved.

Efficiency is also another reason why you should consider conducting the heuristic analysis. It’s a relatively simple process that can be finished in a couple of days, depending on the product’s complexity. The evaluators who analyze the interface usually work independently which allows the development team to focus on other important tasks. Once the evaluation is over, designers point out the inconsistencies and errors and submit them to the experts to re-test. This results in an efficient feedback loop that works throughout the development process.

Although heuristic analysis is not a replacement for usability testing, it sets the foundation to improve the experience on the side of user testing. Heuristic evaluation also tends to bring improvement in key business metrics such as bounce rate, click-through rate, and user engagement.

When should you conduct Heuristic Evaluation?

There is no hard and fast rule. Heuristic Evaluation can be conducted at any stage of the design process. Although many suggest performing it at a later stage as they feel it won’t be productive to perform it too early, it is good for iteration, allowing you to get more feedback if performed earlier.

Generally, with new products, heuristic evaluation is often performed after wireframing and prototyping and before visual design and UI development begins. Conducting it too late would be a costly affair and involves making lots of changes.

How to conduct Heuristic Evaluation?

Running an effective Heuristic Analysis requires careful preparation and some crucial steps to follow, which would help you yield the best possible results. Here’s the checklist.

1. Defining the scope

Since companies usually have limited budgets set for their projects and demand a specific timeline, the first and foremost step is to define the scope of your heuristic evaluation, for which it would be important to understand whether the entire site needs to be examined or only some crucial areas. For example, in the case of an eCommerce site, assessing the entire site could be a very time-consuming and costly deal. On the other hand, having a limited scope wherein only certain areas will be looked at such as the registration page, product page, or the checkout page, would allow the job to be finished in a relatively shorter span and would be comparatively less expensive.

2. Selecting Evaluators

Evaluators must be chosen carefully. They should be the usability experts and would be ideal if they possess expertise in your industry domain. To conduct a traditional heuristic analysis, multiple evaluators would be required to examine the user interface. A single evaluator cannot pinpoint every usability issue even if they are experienced. It is suggested to go with 3-5 evaluators as they would put forward a comprehensive analysis of your design covering all major and minor usability issues.

3. Knowing business requirements and end-users

The usability experts should be able to understand the business objectives of the product. For this matter, seek evaluators with diverse professional backgrounds and those who can relate to the product as they would have got the idea of specific customer needs and can present solutions that might have been overlooked by the developers.

Knowing your end-users is also an important part of performing a heuristic evaluation. Are they novices or experts? What do the demographics say? Although heuristics were considered as global usability standards, extra emphasis must be placed on older audience’s accessibility. Thus, to facilitate heuristic evaluation, distinct user personas must be created.

4. Briefing Evaluators

Have a brief discussion with your evaluators about what they are supposed to perform and cover during evaluation. You may ask them to focus on a certain set of tasks but more often than not, it is the other way around, and the evaluators instruct on the tasks they will perform based on their experience and expertise. A briefing session is crucial to ensure that everything remains on the same page and nothing goes out of track.

5. Evaluation

When a group of experts performs the heuristic analysis, each evaluator assesses the UI separately. This helps ensure that the evaluations are unbiased and independent. In the initial phase, the evaluators use and feel the product and gain insights into its nature, complexity, and scope followed by identifying specific elements that need to be evaluated. Post this phase, the experts will apply heuristics to the identified elements and focus individually on each.

6. Record Problems and Keep an Observer

You can either ask the evaluators to record problems or take this onus on your shoulders while they perform inspection tasks to detect problems. While doing this, ask the experts to be as detailed and specific as possible. It is also advised to use an observer for an effective evaluation. Even though this may overload the work a bit, this certainly brings many advantages. The observer takes notes in every evaluation session so as to present a consolidated report when the evaluation process ends rather than putting forward a separate set of reports from each evaluator.

7. Debriefing

The debriefing session is all about the collaboration between different evaluators. Once all the evaluations are done, the usability experts collate and aggregate the findings. They share their observations with each other and form a common conclusion that covers all the usability issues based on the level of severity. They then suggest solutions to the product development team to counter those potential issues that do not hold up to the usability standards.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, leveraging the heuristics of Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Munich is crucial to evaluate your product’s design interface but at the same time, having your own design principles is necessary as it would guide you to create an even better user experience.

Heuristic evaluation can be a great way to improve the usability of your product, however, the primary concern associated with it (also reported by experts) is of false alarms being generated by the evaluators rather than the genuine problems (as we discussed in the cons of heuristic evaluation). To eliminate or minimize the misreporting effect, it is recommended to use several usability experts, collate the reported issues and conduct a debriefing session.

Heuristic Analysis is not a sure-shot option but since it compares a product’s UI with the already defined and popular usability heuristics, it helps identify the specific problems and come up with solutions that make the design even more compelling.