Heuristic Evaluation: How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

A representation of four of the 10 usability heuristics.

Heuristic evaluation is the activity of using a set of guidelines (heuristics) to evaluate if an interface is user-friendly. Let’s look at what heuristics are and how you can conduct a heuristic evaluation to improve the usability of your designs.

What are Heuristics?

“Heuristics” simply means guidelines. In user experience design, it is nearly impossible to define rigid rules. There is no fool-proof way to create experiences that are guaranteed to work. Instead, you can refer to principles to guide you in your design process, to help you evaluate your work before you test it with real users. Several researchers and leaders have proposed different sets of guidelines for user interface design. Let’s look at one of the most popular guidelines proposed by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich.

Nielsen and Molich's 10 User Interface Design Heuristics

Jakob Nielsen, a usability consultant and partner in the Nielsen Norman Group, and Rolf Molich, usability engineer and founder of DialogDesign, established a list of ten user interface design guidelines in the 1990s. In this video, William Hudson explains each of these heuristics, along with illustrative examples.

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These heuristics are applied at the “Surface” element of the user’s experience. However, user experience is created by design decisions taken at the strategy (why and for whom are you building the solution?), scope (what is it that you’re building?) and the structure and skeleton (how does the solution work?) levels. So, it is helpful to keep heuristics in mind throughout the design process. Let’s say you are creating the user flow for a task in a mobile application (the structure). If you map the task flow close to the real-world task that users are already familiar with (heuristic #2: match between system and the real world), your interface (the surface) will be more likely to adhere to this heuristic.

Illustration of an iceberg depicting the elements of user experience.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

When you go shopping at the grocery store, sometimes you realize you’ve added extra items that you can do without, and take them out before reaching the checkout counter. Or, perhaps you request the cashier to remove an item even after they have billed it, realizing it is far too expensive. When designing the online version of the checkout process, your architecture should therefore support the back-and-forth movement between the different parts of the checkout process and the interface will need to as well.

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Adapting Heuristics to Your Context

Technology has changed drastically since Nielsen and Molich first wrote the heuristics. For example, mobile devices and voice-based smart devices demand more context-specific heuristics. That said, Nielsen and Molich’s principles have stood the test of time and continue to be relevant. For example, on a voice-based interface, the heuristic “visibility of the system status” continues to be relevant; what changes is how you implement it (perhaps through a flickering light, or a dedicated sound effect). As new technology continues to emerge, you must learn how to adapt these heuristics to the new technologies, and if required, extend or add to the heuristics. For instance, ergonomics and judicious use of screen real estate are heuristics specific to mobile devices.

How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

Remember to Document Your Work

In general, the more evaluators you have, the more usability issues you will unearth, especially when the evaluators have different skill sets. However, Jakob Nielsen suggests that between three and five evaluators is sufficient. With five evaluators, you should be able to identify up to 75% of all issues. While increasing the number of evaluators will help you find more issues, it may not be worth the time and effort.

Graph showing the decreasing rate at which newer usability issues are found as the <a href=number of evaluators increase." width="4001" height="2251" />

© Jakob Nielsen and Nielsen Norman Group, Fair Use (Link)

Pros and Cons of Heuristic Evaluation

Like any suggested method in research and design, there are both pros and cons in the usability inspection method of heuristic evaluation. Let’s examine a few of them:

Pros of Heuristic Evaluation

Cons of Heuristic Evaluation

Start conducting your own heuristic evaluations with the help of this template:

Get your free template for “How to Conduct Your Own Heuristic Evaluation”

The Take Away

In user experience design, there are no hard rules that guarantee success. Instead, there are general guidelines, principles, or rules of thumb that you use to inform and evaluate your work. These guidelines are called heuristics, and when you evaluate your (or your competitor’s) work against these heuristics, it is called heuristic evaluation.

One of the most popular sets of heuristics are those created by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich. These are:

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Heuristic evaluation can be a useful inspection method; however, some experts have identified issues with evaluators reporting false alarms, rather than genuine problem elements within designs. To limit the effect misreporting has on the applicability of findings from heuristic evaluation, it helps to use a number of different evaluators, collate their problems and carry out a debriefing session to root out false alarms at various stages in the design process.

Heuristic evaluation is one of the many tools to guide your design process. However, it is not the only one that you should rely on. Make sure you conduct user research and test your designs with real users to continually refine your work.

References and Where To Learn More

Learn more about Jakob Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design here

Ben Shneiderman proposed a set of guidelines, often dubbed “Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design,” four years before Nielsen and Molich published theirs. While they are worded slightly differently, there is a significant overlap between the two sets and you can read more about it here

Nielsen compared eleven sets of guidelines proposed by various authors and curated a synthesized list that tackles the larger question: which heuristics help unearth usability issues? To know more, please see here.

Here are Enrico Bertini, Silvia Gabrielli and Stephen Kimani’s heuristics adapted for mobile devices.

Images

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0