Heuristic Evaluations

By Cathleen Zapata

I believe the term “heuristic evaluations” originally came from Jakob Nielsen, the “father of usability”. A heuristic evaluation is a research method that involves a group of experts separately reviewing a UI design and identifying problems based on set of heuristics, or standards/rules of thumb. If you don’t have time to set up a usability study for your project, you may want to consider having a heuristic evaluation done. In a perfect world, you would conduct both a usability study and a heuristic evaluation on your design.

The key to a heuristic evaluation is that you’re using experts who know and understand the rules and design guidelines. One benefit to a heuristic evaluation is that it can be done fairly quickly. So if you’re under time constraints, you may want to consider this type of evaluation method.

Heuristic evaluations have their disadvantages too. One disadvantage is that it may not catch everything. There are different sets of guidelines out there, so it depends on what guidelines your “experts” are going by. Most experts follow Nielsen’s guidelines, but these guidelines have been questioned and other guidelines do exist.

And, depending on who your experts are, it can be expensive. Nielsen Norman Group’s (NN/g) rates START at $35,000 for a traditional website. Now, since NN/g is clearly an expert in this field as their research has been followed so widely, I’m sure you’re going to get what you pay for. That said, not everyone has $35,000 to spend on this type of research method!

So, there’s other options too that are just as quick but more within your budget. First, you can find other vendors who may be more in your price range. Or, consider a “Guidelines Walkthrough” which still involves adhering to the standard guidelines, but it uses task scenarios to guide the analysis. You’ll need to find experienced usability practitioners for this type of evaluation, but not necessarily expert/professional evaluators. This is usually much cheaper and still very quick. You probably won’t find all the problems, but again, it’s better than no usability at all.

How do I get started?

Whether you’re going for a heuristic evaluation or a guidelines walkthrough, you’re going to need to find about 3 people to participate in the evaluation. It is just too difficult and unrealistic for one person to find all the usability problems.

Each evaluator should inspect the design on his/her own. The evaluators should only be allowed to communicate once all of their evaluations are complete. The evaluators can either write down their findings report style, or verbally communicate their findings to you. It will probably take the evaluators 1-2 hours to complete their evaluations depending on how much they are evaluating and the complexity of the design. And it usually takes several walkthroughs for a thorough evaluation.

There are several books on this topic and a lot of info online. Check out Jakob Nielsen’s paper on this topic at www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_evaluation.html.

Books on Heuristic Evaluations

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