A heuristic evaluation is an expert analysis of the usability of a website or product. Although the name sounds costly, it is an inexpensive technique.
Heuristic evaluations are an expert evaluation of a product, and therefore can only provide an approximation of the findings that you might expect from a usability study. However, UX professionals often use expert evaluations to complement usability studies or to determine what to test.
Heuristics are mental shortcuts or assumptions that help us quickly make sense of the world.
We assume that someone dressed in a suit on a weekday morning is headed to work. We see a woman running behind a baby carriage, take note of her jogging clothes and decide that she is the baby’s mother – not a kidnapper.
Jakob Nielsen’s heuristics are the most well-known, but others exist.
How do Heuristic Evaluations work?
The expert uses your website or software product and looks for violations of the guidelines. For instance, hundreds of ad-packed pages would fail the heuristic ‘Aesthetic and Minimalist Design’.
Do they work? Yes and no.
So why should you use it? A heuristic evaluation bypasses the effort needed to conduct usability tests and skips straight to the report phase. It is a great way to quickly and cheaply point out a number of serious usability issues. Use it early in the design process to uncover some blatant problems and start a usability plan, but be aware that testing may uncover additional, and possibly more severe, issues.
Nielsen’s Heuristics
The well-known Nielsen-Molich heuristics state that a system should:
Here is a great article explaining Heuristic Evaluations.
Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland shares his heuristics here.