How to evaluate your product by yourself
The evaluation by all the rules
As a UX team, we have a lot of cases when non-UX experts want to understand if the product works well. And in this article, we will try to explain how to conduct such research if you are not a researcher.
There are a lot of methods to evaluate the interface. But today we will try to see Heuristic Evaluation from another point of view. According to super respectful UX experts from Nielsen Norman Group, this method is valid only when evaluators are usability experts, we need at least 3 researches, etc. But what to do if you are a manager, developer, QA expert, or any kind of non-UX person, but want to understand what can be wrong with your product?
In this article, we are trying to explain what you can do.
When you can and can’t do it by yourself
Let’s pay attention to the self-evaluation goal:
1) you are doing this not for the designer;
2) you are doing this not instead of a designer.
This specific test to understand how good your website or application is. To be sure no harm done, read the lists below.
You can do it when:
- You see that users don’t understand / like the product and you want to talk with the design team about this;
- You are a product manager/product owner, and you want to understand the interface better;
- You work in customer support and need to clarify types of issues users can have
You can’t do it when:
- You just provide a designer with a list of concerns and demand to eliminate them
- You think that you can do it better than an expert by just reading the article. Since you are not one, the risk to lose many crucial concerns is pretty high
To summarize all said above: self-evaluation isn’t comprehensive research. It’s for your general understanding of how your service works at the moment.
Easy evaluation
Heuristic Evaluation is an evaluation based on 10 main rules. So we open these rules, open the interface, and check whether our interactions comply with these rules. You can check the original here, but let’s try to convert them into 10 simple questions to ask yourself about the interface you see.
- Do I understand where am I right now? What action was before? How can I get my goal?
Visibility of system status.
When you see the interface, you have to see clearly in what place of the app you are right now (you can check here navigation, e.g., does the active navigation item looks active?). If you are working on some process: do you understand how long this process will take, where are you right now? When you click or select something, does the UI show you that you really did this action?
2. Do I understand the words / the interactions?
Match between system and the real world.
When you use the interface, you must understand the language, do you know what action will do what. And which is more important: is it easy to understand for your users?
3. Can I go back? Can I cancel a process I’ve made by accident?
User control and freedom.
We all make mistakes. Users are not the exception. It’s necessary to be able to cancel or undo the action, always. And when you are intended to make something that you can’t change, the interface should warn you about it.
4. Do you have the same names for the same actions? Same colors for the same icons?
Consistency and standards.
You must have the same names for the same actions. It means that a button “Cancel” has to be a button “Cancel” everywhere. Not a link, or a button. Not “Undo” or “Back” — still “Cancel.” Same about the links, they should look the same through all the screens.
5. Did I get a warning before I did something wrong?
Error prevention.
It means that you know which fields are required for any form, so you can avoid a situation when you fill some form fields, you click confirm, and only after that, you realize that you haven’t filled a required field. You clearly see these warnings before the error happens.
The greatest mistake is to imagine that we never err.
Thomas Carlyle
6. Should I remember any information from previous screens to get my goal?
Recognition rather than recall.
For example, when you go to the shopping cart, do you see all the details of your order, or should you remember them? Do you have all the necessary information right now on this screen to get your goal (in this case, make a purchase)?
7. Can I get rid of things that I don’t like, or customize the interface?
Flexibility and efficiency of use.
Can you close the banner on the top of the face? Can you use a keyboard to navigate the page, instead of the cursor, if you are an advanced user? Can the interface let you personalize it to have more experience?
8. Am I too lazy to read lots of text? How challenging it is to navigate through the content to find what I need?
Aesthetic and minimalist design.
The design should help you to accomplish the goal but not confuse you. There should be texts easy-to-read, broken into blocks, with spacings making it obvious which heading belongs to which article or caption belongs to which picture and so on. Eventually, shorter — better.
9. Do I understand immediately if something went wrong? Do I know how to fix the problem?
Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors.
This is really important to see that there is an issue or an error. You have to see the problem clearly, have a description, possible causes of the problem. What’s more important, see recommendations on what to do. The best example you likely see often: you did an action, nothing happened, and the system just says nothing. So you have no clue what’s going on and how to fix it properly.
10. Am I alone in this interface?
Help and documentation.
This is important for you to see that there is always help for you (FAQ, live chat, help center, contacts, documentation).
What to do next?
If you have some notes after this little research, you can talk to the design team and find a way to create hypotheses and check them with UX methods. Usability testing, real heuristic evaluation, review the analytics, etc.
If you notice lots of possible mistakes after that research, you probably ask for a proper expert evaluation (may we propose our help?). A good design agency can provide you with a comprehensive report and, which is more important — with recommendations on how to eliminate those problems.
Yevheniia Klysha,
lead UX designer at Angle2
