Regardless of industry or product, each heuristic evaluation follows a similar process. Here’s what that looks like.
Plan your evaluation
To conduct a heuristic evaluation, you’ll need a set of tasks for your evaluators to carry out. These tasks should encompass everything you want a visitor to be able to do when they visit your site. There are two ways to identify the tasks:
- Develop a set of tasks within your team and pass them on to the evaluators to execute on.
- Brief your evaluators on the site’s goals and ask them to develop their own tasks.
Whichever way you choose, you’ll want to make sure you’re testing a wide variety of actions.
Choose evaluators
While you may think that having as many evaluators as possible is best for finding usability issues, studies have shown that 3-5 evaluators find more than 90% of a site’s usability problems. However, if you’re struggling to find evaluators, you can still benefit from even one person.
When selecting your evaluators, try to find a mix of experienced and inexperienced—software ergonomics experts vs. family and friends. Both groups bring a unique perspective that can help your heuristic evaluation.
Review heuristics
With your evaluators in place, you’ll need to brief them on the heuristics you’ll be judging your site against. Whether you’re using Jakob Nielsen’s 10 heuristics, the Weinschenk & Barker standards, or some other combination, your evaluators should know what the shared standards are before they begin the evaluation.
Conduct the evaluation
There are two ways to conduct a heuristic evaluation: Individual or group.
In an individual evaluation, each evaluator navigates the site on their own and reports their findings back to you. This method usually results in more problems being found, but it can be time consuming and difficult to coordinate.
A group evaluation is done with multiple evaluators at the same time and someone from your team recording the problems that are found. This method can be attractive because of its condensed nature, which allows your team to gather the results all at once.
Analyze your results and develop a plan
Analyzing the results of the evaluation process will help you establish the set of usability problems to address. It can be helpful to summarize your usability problems into a list of opportunities to improve your product. Depending on the scope of the project, the size of your team, and the number of problems found, you might consider prioritizing these opportunities by the amount of impact they would have on the product and the level of effort it would take to address them. At this stage, some teams can dismiss certain issues as only one evaluator’s problem. But taking every “user error” seriously is to your benefit. If one of your evaluators found something confusing, there’s a high probability someone else will too. Get ahead of that issue and resolve the problem now.