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Heuristic evaluation

Method

Assess the effectiveness of a product against established design and content standards.

Purpose

  • To learn how a product performs against digital design standards.
  • To identify problems with the user-interface or content.
  • To establish a benchmark against which to measure incremental improvements.

What you get

  • Feedback on how a digital product measures up against design standards.
  • A set of issues that can be investigated and resolved by the product team in a systematic way.

Strengths

  • A way to get fast feedback from an expert in user experience.
  • Several evaluations can be done at different times throughout the iterative design process.
  • Complements other research, such as user testing.

Weaknesses

  • Heuristic evaluation should done instead of user testing with current or prospective users.
  • Findings from the evaluation are only related to the product’s current design.
  • Not useful for informing the product design at a strategic level.

Tips

An experienced user-experience (UX) practitioner should do the evaluation. This person must know how to assess the product against well-established principles and standards.

The standards include:

Toolkits and resources

Updated