Creating a seamless experience using Heuristic Evaluation
One of the most efficient ways to evaluate your designs and ensure you deliver a user-friendly product that goes the extra mile!
They say “Design is subjective”…
Well, it’s true: Any design you come up with is a result of multiple decisions made by you based on your skills, intuition, experiences, and decision-making abilities. And most of these decisions would carry some measure of subjectivity. And at times this subjectivity might also lead to a few disagreements.
What do you do in such sticky situations? How do you evaluate that the solution that you’ve come up with is the best suited one?
Your gut might yell, “That’s the obvious thing to do.” But well, in order to convince other stakeholders and to make your work more credible, you need to benchmark it against some set industry standards. These industry standards not only help you resolve these differences but also help you evaluate the efficacy of your design. One such industry framework is Heuristic Evaluation.
What do you understand by Heuristic Evaluation?
“Heuristic” — can basically be thought of as rules of thumb or principles.
“Heuristic Evaluation” on the other hand is a method of inspecting and evaluating the usability of any product using these principles.
Nowadays, Heuristic Evaluation is also referred to as a “Usability Audit” or an “Expert Review.” Jacob Nielsen came up with 10 heuristic principles back in 1994 and published them in his book Usability Engineering. Nielsen’s heuristics are the most widely recognised and used heuristics for user interface and product design.
Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics
- Visibility of system status: The system should always keep the users informed about what is going on, through suitable feedback within a reasonable time. When they know their status, they learn the outcome of their previous actions and can predict the next steps. These predictable interactions are what creates trust in the product.
2. Match between system and the real world: Use words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than using jargons. Your product should follow real-world conventions and emulate a user’s physical environment. This will make it easier for them to learn and remember how your product works.
3. User control and freedom: A lot of times people perform actions by mistake. In such scenarios it is important to have clearly defined emergency exits. When it’s easy for people to back out of a process, it makes them feel in control of the situation. So, to foster this sense of freedom — make sure you support “Undo” and “Redo” actions with a clear exit for all actions.
4. Consistency and standards: People should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Nowadays they spend most of their time using digital products and they are used to some common practices. Thus, we should not be reinventing the wheel for everything. Follow industry conventions and maintain consistency across the product.
5. Error prevention: Try to eliminate error-prone conditions and always seek confirmation before committing to any action. It is important to understand that there are two types of errors: slips and mistakes. Slips are unconscious errors caused by inattention whereas mistakes are conscious errors that happen because of a mismatch between the user’s mental model and your design. So always warn them beforehand to prevent such errors.
6. Recognition rather than recall: As a designer, you should not solely rely on the user’s recall value. Try to minimise their memory load by making all elements, actions, and options upfront. They should not have to think hard and remember information from one part of the interface to another.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use: As the name suggests, make your product flexible and efficient. Your design should cater to both experienced and inexperienced users. Allow them to customise and tailor frequent actions so they can decide how the product should work for them.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design: Always remember that every piece of information you provide can diminish the visibility of others. So make sure you eliminate any redundant information. Prioritise the content and features to support your primary goals and don’t let unnecessary elements distract you.
9. Help users recognise, diagnose, and recover from errors: As the name suggests, you need to help your users recover from their mistakes. You must always tell them what went wrong in a language they will understand and offer a constructive solution or a shortcut to solve the problem immediately.
10. Help and documentation: “A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.” Likewise your product should not require any additional explanation. However, it is necessary to provide documentation that helps users understand how to complete their tasks. Make this documentation easy to search and whenever possible, present it in right context and at the right time.
Now that we do understand what are the different principles and what kind of problems fall under each of them, let’s take a look at the different ways to approach them.
Different ways to conduct Heuristic Evaluation
In Chauncey Wilson’s book User Interface Inspection Methods: A User-Centered Design Method — he has mentioned 3 approaches to conduct Heuristic Evaluation:
- Object based evaluation: Here, you focus and evaluate problems related to particular UI objects. For eg — dialog boxes, menus, controls like radio buttons, push buttons, and text fields etc.
- Task based evaluation: Here, you focus on a set of flows and report problems that occur when you perform tasks in that particular flow. For eg — Signup flows or Onboarding.
- An object-task hybrid: A hybrid approach combines the object and task approaches. You first work through a set of tasks looking for issues related to heuristics and then evaluate UI objects against the same.
Based on these approaches — you can figure out different usability issues across your product. What then becomes important is how you prioritise these problems. This is where severity ratings come into play.
How do you rate a usability issue?
Severity ratings are ratings that determine how serious a usability issue is. These ratings can be used to allocate the resources and estimate time required to fix all the problems you would have identified during Heuristic Evaluation.
The severity of a usability problem is a combination of three factors:
- Frequency: How common or rare an issue is?
- Impact: How difficult or easy it is for the users to overcome that issue?
- Persistence: Is it a one-time problem that users can overcome once they know about it or is it something the users will repeatedly be bothered by?
Even though severity has several components, you should combine all aspects of severity and give an overall rating to each usability problem so as to prioritise them better. The scale you can use to represent the severity ranges from 0–4.
- 0 refers to negligible outage: Problems which exist but have negligible impact.
- 1 refers to cosmetic problems: Problems which do not need immediate attention and can be fixed if time permits.
- 2 refers to minor problems: Problems which have low impact and should be taken up on low priority.
- 3 refers to major problems: Problems which are important to fix and should be given high priority.
- 4 refers to catastrophes: Problems which are a complete blocker and imperative to fix before the release.
Having said that, these ratings are subjective in nature and may vary from person to person. So a good way to go about it, is to collate ratings from at least 3 designers/experts and use the mean of those ratings. This would help you achieve more reliable ratings.
So, now that we know all about Heuristic Evaluation, let’s circle back to one of the most important things: when to use it.
When should you conduct Heuristic Evaluation?
You should undertake Heuristic Evaluation under following scenarios:
- When you have limited or no access to users:
Since this method does not require you to recruit users it is a good way to go. You will be able to produce an extremely fast review without having to set up a full-fledged Usability Testing session. - When you are looking for breadth in your review:
While User Testing is considered the best approach, it is mostly designed to cover only small portions of product. Heuristic Evaluation on the other hand can provide you additional breadth and complement other assessment techniques. - When you need a quick and affordable way to review your product:
Heuristic Evaluation does not need a lot of resources, and can be used at any stage of development. You can save up a lot of cost if you perform Heuristic Evaluation before the actual User Testing takes place.
So to sum it up, Heuristic Evaluation is a good way to test the usability of your product but these evaluations should not be used in place of User Testing.
The Bottom Line
With good knowledge of users, tasks, and environments, Heuristic Evaluation can be a useful tool. We feel this method can come in really handy and we’d love it if you keep it right up your alley! To help you get a better grip on the subject, we also have a little giveaway :) We have come up with quite an exhaustive cheat sheet that you can use to evaluate your products and maybe flex a little! ;)
We hope you go and smash those usability issues!!!
Thank you and happy testing!
A huge shoutout to Ramakrishna, Lavanya, and Sonalisa for all the support and feedback and a big thank you to Supriya for all the lovely illustrations :)
References
- User Interface Inspection Methods: A User-Centered Design Method by Chauncey Wilson
- Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/
- Ways to conduct Heuristic Evaluation: http://digilib.stmik-banjarbaru.ac.id/data.bc/100.%20Other/2014%20User%20Interface%20Inspection%20Methods.pdf
- Heuristic Markup (Page 136): https://pdfroom.com/books/the-user-experience-team-of-one/Xn2GJrDlgxV
- Heuristic Evaluation Checklist: https://adamfard.com/download-ux-resources/heuristic-evaluation-checklist-template
