Heuristic Analysis for UX — A walkthrough
Being a user experience designer requires switching between confusions and tensions. It may be creative tension, managing stakeholder tension, or constantly living in the confusion between design expertise and user centered design methods.
In this article let us look at what exactly UX designer’s mean by the term “heuristic evaluation”, what are those Heuristics, how to conduct a heuristic evaluation for yourself, How to handle un availability of Usability experts and the real difference between a heuristic evaluation and user testing.
There is a common argument in the design industry, which always happen “If you’re such an expert and have the experience you claim, how come you can’t just give us the answers for the right design?” Well, if the person have sufficient experience and expertise in usability, he will also be well aware that users are unpredictable. It’s common to experience ‘aha!’ moments in usability tests that show something we never expected, even when the design seems to conform to key heuristics perfectly.
I’ll be going in detail with the following topics:
- What is a heuristic evaluation?
2. What are Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design?
3. What is the process to conduct heuristic evaluation?
4. What are the challenges behind heuristic evaluation?
5. How heuristic evaluation is different from user testing?
- What is a heuristic evaluation? Why and When to do it?
Heuristic evaluation is an examine conducted by small set of evaluators about the interface and judge it’s compliance with recognized usability principles called ‘heuristics’.
A specific set of heuristics contains empirical rules of thumb, best practices, standards, rules, and conventions that have been tested or observed over long periods of time. Following this simply outputs the better user experience. A heuristic evaluation expert, or the evaluator is ideally a usability testing expert who has deep understanding of the chosen set of heuristics. They would typically come from the disciplines of human factors, interaction design (IXD), HCI (human-computer interaction) and/or UX design, with complementary backgrounds in disciplines such as psychology, computer science, information sciences, and commerce/business. During this process, examiners /evaluators assign a “severity level” to each of the usability issues identified. As a rule, UX designers concentrate on the most critical issues on the backlog first to the least critical.
Below are the two major reasons to perform a heuristic analysis
1. To improve the usability of a digital product
2. Efficiency (the speed with which a product can be used as a direct consequence of better usability)
Delivering above two components with high quality will greatly improve the user experience of a product.
To perform heuristic analysis, there are no hard and fast rules. It can be performed at any advanced stage of the design process.
2. What are Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design?
Following are the 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
1. Visibility of system status
The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
2. Match between system and the real world
The system should speak the users’ language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
3. User control and freedom
Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
4. Consistency and standards
Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.
5. Error prevention
Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
6. Recognition rather than recall
Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
Accelerators unseen by the novice user may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
10. Help and documentation
Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.
3. What is the process to conduct heuristic evaluation?
Following is the process to conduct heuristics evaluation:
1. Define the scope.
2. Understand the business requirements and demographic of the end-users.
3. Evaluate the experience and identify usability issues.
4. Decide about reporting tools and heuristics to use.
5. Analyze, aggregate, and present the results.
4. What are the challenges behind heuristic evaluation?
Below are few of the common challenges in heuristic evaluation
1. Experienced usability experts are difficult to find and sometimes expensive too
2. Some times, a heuristic analysis may set off false alarms: Issues that would not necessarily have a negative effect on the overall UX if left alone are sometimes flagged to be fixed
3. If the evaluators are not part of the design or dev team, they may be unaware of any technical limitations on the design
5. How heuristic evaluation is different from user testing?
Heuristic evaluation and usability testing are two different methods for finding usability problems and they are conducted at different times of product design life cycle.
In heuristic evaluation, experts look at the user interface and identifies the problems. In usability testing, potential users try out the user interface with real tasks. The problems found with usability testing are true problems - meaning, at least one user encountered each problem. The problems found with heuristic evaluation are potential problems the evaluator suspects that something may be a problem to users. Early in development, heuristic evaluation has a hit-rate of around 50% and reports around 50% false problems.
Final thoughts
Many times, applications suffer from poor usability. In such situations it might be helpful from a dose of heuristic analysis performed by experts and may see a dramatic improvement in their UX without breaking the budget. A single experienced UX expert can uncover a substantial number of usability issues during a heuristic analysis. However, if time and money allows, group of experts can uncover most usability issues and offers a significant ROI. This ROI would be based on the increase in user productivity as well as estimated on the expected increase in product sales due to higher customer satisfaction, better ratings, and an uptick in positive reviews.
