Quickly identify big user issues in your product and make sure it conforms to User Experience best practices.

How it works

Heuristic evaluations are a discount usability method that uses a guided inspection process to identify issues in a product. A small group of reviewers – usually four or five – step through the product experience while completing a checklist that is used to guide and standardize their evaluations. A research analyst compiles the results of all the reviewers’ responses. The result is a low-level detailed analysis of the product workflow with issues called out with their recommended resolutions.

Pros:

• Heuristics are fast. The results can usually be returned in a day or two. A small group of expert reviewers can generally be relied upon to find most of the big issues in a product experience.

Cons:

• This does not return the richness of qualitative insights that would be gotten through testing with actual end users. While faster than usability testing, it is not necessarily more cost effective since expert reviewers must be engaged and issues that would otherwise have been revealed through Usability Testing with real users may go undiscovered.