Data-driven Design Part II - Heuristic Usability Evaluation: A Comprehensive Guide with a Free Figma Starter Kit

In the world of digital products, ensuring that an interface is intuitive and easy-to-use has become more than just a nice-to-have — it's a necessity. Based on research 88% of online consumers say they wouldn’t return to a website after a bad user experience but still only around 55% of companies evaluate their user interfaces. One of the fastest way to start evaluating and identifying UX issues of your digital product is heuristic usability evaluation. This technique, rooted in established usability principles, can significantly enhance the quality of your design without requiring extensive resources.

This Heuristic Usability Evaluation article is the second part of the Explained data-driven design trilogy:

1. Analytics software: Analyze UX on auto-pilot 24/7
2. Heuristic Usability Evaluation: UX expert to the rescue
3. User testing: website/app tested by actual users

What is a Heuristic Usability Evaluation?

Using heuristic usability evaluation is like hiring a powerful UX soldier to tackle the UX issues for you. These "soldiers" are UX professionals who have already a solid background in understanding different UX principles and guidelines and therefore are able to bring a way more comprehensive UX analyses than ordinary users browsing your website or app.

The goal of the heuristic usability evaluation is to identify usability problems in a user interface. Evaluators judge the design against a selected set of research-based UX guidelines that make systems easy to use.

It's worth noting that heuristic evaluation doesn't usually analyze the visual design of the UI but focus on functionality and usability. This approach gives more objective and data-driven results than commenting on more subjective design decisions like font styles, graphics, or colors unless they are related to usability.

Is Heuristic Usability Evaluation the right Design Method for me?

Heuristic evaluation is a valuable method for improving the quality of your product and optimizing usability. While it cannot replace usability tests with real users, it can help identify obvious issues and make usability testing more focused and productive from the start. Therefore, it is recommended to conduct a heuristic evaluation before usability testing.

Heuristic usability evaluation is suitable for teams of varying sizes and budgets, as it can be performed by a small group of 1-5 usability experts. It is more cost-effective than user testing, which can be time-consuming and complex in terms of finding users, gathering feedback, analyzing results, and validating improvements. Although multiple testers are recommended, even a single UX expert can significantly help to detect UX issues and give suggestions for improvements usually within a day.

It is important to note that choosing the right heuristics is crucial for effective evaluation. If the wrong heuristics are selected, some usability issues may be overlooked. If hiring external usability experts is not feasible, conducting an usability analysis internally using internal UX designers can also provide valuable insights. It is usually worth requesting an analysis from an UX expert who's not been actively part of the design project yet to avoid bias and gather more objective results.

Overall, heuristic testing can be particularly beneficial for small teams, offering valuable insights and optimization opportunities without the need for extensive user testing initiatives or big budget. If you're for example a startup, heuristic usability evaluation can be used to catch a significant amount of UX issues already before the initial release, increasing your chances that users will actually finish the onboarding and start using your product in the first place.

When to use Heuristic Usability Evaluation

• You have a functional prototype or app that can be tested
• You have a limited budget and/or time
• You want to get general feedback on the usability of a prototype before you launch it to the public

How to perform a heuristic usability evaluation?

Step 1: Choose Usability heuristic

Usability problems in a user interface are done by examining it against established design principles also known as heuristics. Heuristics are broad rules of thumb and not specific usability guidelines. Each principle serves as a measure of usability, helping designers pinpoint specific areas for improvement.

Jakob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics

The most recognized set of heuristics used in the heuristic usability evaluation are so called Nielsen's heuristics developed by cognitive scientist and one of the early pioneers of UX Jakob Nielsen in the 1990s. These are:

1: Visibility of System Status

The design should always keep users informed about the current status, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time. Predictable interactions create trust in the product and the brand as a whole.

Practical examples to communicate system status for the user:

• Loading states
• Error states
• Success messages
• Hover states
• Selected states
• Disabled states
• Focused states
• Empty states
• Current location
• Step Wizard states

2: Match Between the System and the Real World

When designing, it’s crucial to use words, phrases, and concepts that are familiar to your users, avoiding internal jargon. Adhering to real-world conventions ensures that information is presented in a natural and logical order. Design that is mapped to real-world conventions makes it easier for users to learn and remember how the interface works, creating an intuitive user experience.

Practical examples of the natural mapping between system and the real world:

• Using same colors as the users' industry uses e.g. red for "Stop"
• Using icons, shapes and images that match the target users and cultural conventions: e.g. In some countries checkmark can be used to mark "incorrect" state whereas others it is used for "success"
• Using terminology and concepts users are used to: for example "back-end" often means any code related work for marketeers but for tech teams it refers to backend development.

3: User Control and Freedom

Users frequently make mistakes while navigating interfaces. It’s essential to provide a clearly marked “emergency exit” to allow them to leave an unwanted action without enduring a lengthy process.

When users can easily back out of a process or undo an action, it fosters a sense of freedom and confidence. Clear exits help users stay in control of the system, preventing frustration and ensuring a smoother experience.

Practical examples of user control and freedom:

• Back button
• Close button
• Undo/redo button
• Cancel button
• Discard button

4: Consistency and Standards

Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. It’s important to follow platform and industry conventions to ensure clarity.

According to Jakob’s Law, people spend most of their time using digital products other than yours. Their experiences with these other products shape their expectations. If you fail to maintain consistency, you may increase users’ cognitive load by forcing them to learn something new.

Practical examples of consistency and standards:

• Making same level of actions look the same visually to support communicating the information hierarchy for the user
• Using design patterns from the products users are already familiar with to improve learnability

5: Error Prevention

Effective error messages are crucial, but the best designs proactively prevent issues from arising. Just like airplanes following lights on the runway help them in successful lift-off, a gentle guidance in the UI helps users to stay on the right track. Error messages can make users feel stupid and blame themselves instead of bad UX, but good error prevention can help to minimize that.

There are two types of errors: slips and mistakes. Slips are unconscious errors caused by inattention, while mistakes are conscious errors resulting from a mismatch between the user’s mental model and the design.

Practical examples of error prevention:

• Guiding user with visual guidelines and helper texts
• Hiding buttons that are not relevant for user's current state
• Disabling actions until pre-conditions are fulfilled
• Splitting long forms into sections to make them less error-prone
• Using summary pages on long forms to review all pages before form submission
• Setting min/max limits and regex validations for form fields

6: Recognition Rather than Recall

Humans have limited short-term memory. By designing interfaces that promote recognition rather than recall, you can significantly reduce the cognitive effort required from users.

To enhance user experience, minimize the user’s memory load by ensuring that elements, actions, and options that are needed in the current context are visible. Users should not need to remember information from one part of the interface to another. Make essential information, such as field labels or menu items, easily visible or retrievable when needed.

Practical examples to support recognition rather than recall:

• Using breadcrumbs to inform user about the current navigation state
• Preferring contextual help instead of long generic manuals or FAQ pages
• Using autocomplete fields and dropdowns instead of free input fields when possible

7: Flexibility and Efficiency of Use

Shortcuts, which are hidden from beginners, can greatly accelerate interactions for advanced users. This strategy allows the design to serve both novice and expert users. Let users customize frequent actions to suit their needs.

Flexible processes should be available, enabling users to choose the method that works best for them. This adaptability enhances usability and provides a more personalized user experience.

Practical examples to improve flexibility:

• Supporting keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl + D for advanced users to speed up their workflows
• Supporting touch controls like swiping
• Allowing users save their most common actions, searches, assets etc.
• Allowing advanced users to customize the UI with personal themes, reordering etc.

8: Aesthetic and Minimalist Design

Interfaces should avoid including irrelevant or rarely needed information. Each extra piece of information competes with important content, reducing its visibility.

In complex user interfaces, ensure that the UI is organized dynamically in a way that displays only actions that are relevant for the current user selections and state. You should not display actions to delete or edit asset if there is no asset selected for example.

Practical examples for minimalistic design:

• Displaying only the most frequently used, necessary information on top level
• Using information hierarchies and dynamic UIs to match the current user state
• Using animations, images and colors to convey a meaning, not just as a decoration or gimmick

9: Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors

Error messages should be expressed in plain language without complex technical language or error codes. Error codes should precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution using positive psychology whenever possible. The error messages should be presented clearly so that users can notice and recognize them.

Practical examples for displaying errors:

• Using animated toast messages that are always displayed on top of the UI regardless of user's scroll state
• Using field level error messages focusing user on the error of a specific field whenever possible
• Use easy-to-understand error visuals like red color.
• Using positive messages like "It's not you, it's us." instead of blaming users for doing something wrong.

10: Help and Documentation

User interface is like a joke: If you need to explain it, it's probably not that good. However, in more complex user interfaces users may need support to complete their tasks successfully.

In 2024, long user manuals and lengthy FAQ pages are usually a thing of the past. If you have a generic help documentation, the minimum is that it has a proper search and filtering options. No user want to read about solving other problems they have just to find a solution to their problem.

Better approach than a documentation portal is usually providing clear contextual help in context where the help is related to. This can be done with plain text or tooltips for example.

Practical examples for help and documentation:

• Using contextual tooltips providing more details about specific section
• Using contextual helper text under the field
• Avoiding lengthy user manuals without proper search and filtering

Other heuristics options

Although Nielsen's heuristics are clearly the most used and trusted heuristics for heuristic usability evaluation and recommended choice in most cases, there are some other principles and guidelines as well that can be used to replace or complement Nielsen's heuristics.

Here are some alternative heuristics next to Nielsen's heuristics:

• Schneiderman's Eight Golden Rules
• Bastien's and Chapin's Heuristics

While heuristic usability evaluation is often focusing on the broad generally accepted principles ie. heuristics, sometimes also more specific UI guidelines can be used as part of the evaluation to give more in-depth analysis. Commonly known and accepted UI guidelines are:

• Human Interface guidelines by Apple (HIG) contains guidance and best practices that can help you design a great experience for any Apple platform including Vision Pro.
• Material Design guidelines by Google (MUI) is an adaptable system of guidelines, components, and tools that supports the best practices of user interface design on a variety of platforms.

In addition to generic guidelines, many companies create additionally their own specific set of guidelines that can be used as a reference within the company. This can be related to specific customer audience or domain knowledge for example.

Step 2: Conduct the evaluation

Before evaluation, evaluator(s) are briefed about the system's domain, tasks, and users. Each evaluator is given a workbook like a template.

Download Free Heuristic Usability Evaluation Figma Starter Kit here

The scope of the evaluation is agreed before the evaluation and can include the whole app or only certain pages or parts like navigation. Evaluators independently explore the interface, identifying deviations from usability principles.

Depending on the size of the application most of the usability evaluations can be finished in less than a day but some bigger applications may require couple of days.

Step 3: Summarize & present the results

If multiple evaluators are used, evaluators will gather together to analyze the results and find patterns. Finally all results are summarized and evaluator will go through the findings and improvement suggestions with the product team. Sometimes the evaluation presentation can also be recorded to make it more suitable for asynchronous communication.

What's the difference between Heuristic evaluation vs UX Audit?

Once the UX designer starts to feel confident with the Heuristic usability evaluation, next level to unlock is something called UX Audit. While UX Audit has no official definition like heuristic evaluation, it is often used to describe the overall UX evaluation of the application.

Scope

While heuristic evaluations provide focused insights into usability issues based on generally accepted principles, UX audits offer a broader and more comprehensive examination, and can contain analysis of factors such as:

• Accessibility
• User domain knowledge
• Information Architecture
• Visual design
• Target market & competition
• Existing analytics data e.g. from Hotjar, Diib, Semrush or similar.

Note that most UX Audits include elements from heuristic usability evaluation as well.

Deliverables

In a UX audit, the deliverable typically consists of a comprehensive report describing identified issues across various UX elements, whereas Heuristic evaluation limits the findings only to the usability heuristics. Hence UX Audit is a more strategic document supporting the planning of the the UX strategy whereas Heuristic Usability evaluation is focused on a in-depth usability analysis of a specific feature or task.

Timing

While heuristic usability evaluation is often used in the beginning of the product development, UX Audit is often conducted on an existing website before revamping the website.

Looking for a Heuristic Usability Evaluation or UX Audit for your product?

As you understand now the importance of UX audits and heuristic evaluations, it’s evident that these offer invaluable insights for optimizing the value and effectiveness of your digital products. As a professional Human-Computer Interaction Specialist Zuzze offers customized UX audit and heuristic usability evaluation services with 10+ years of experience. Audits are delivered within 1-2 days, ensuring quick and cost-effective way to detect usability issues and boost your conversion rates.