Heuristic evaluations may sound like an unfamiliar concept, but chances
are you're already employing a similar approach in your design work.
It's a powerful research method that can help you identify usability
issues and improve your designs. By bringing more structure and rigor to
the process, heuristic evaluations can enhance your design practice.
The Three-Step Process
At its core, a heuristic evaluation follows a straightforward three-step
process:
Next up, we'll be talking about a concept that sounds a little weird, but I assure you it's a great deal more familiar than you think. It's called heuristic evaluations. It's one of my favorite research methods, and it's something that I think a lot of people already kind of do. But it's a way of bringing a little bit more rigor and concreteness to the process that I think will really, really help level up your design practice. Heuristic evaluations are basically a three-step process where you go through a checklist that you've built ahead of time for your product and try to understand if there are any specific issues coming out of it.
It's a very, very easy three-step process. You make a checklist. You go through the site with a checklist. You identify issues and ways to fix it. It's really great for understanding things that are very just rigorous, quantitative, bug-based sort of things.
It's sort of a QA process for usability. And a lot of people already do this. They have within their own expertise a set of things that they just look at. So whenever I'm opening a page I look at your navigation, I look at your headline, I look at your call to action I look at your overall copy and organization on the home page. Then I might go in and click a few links and see how you've structured your pricing or organized your collections or whatever have you for whatever the site happens to be.
And we all do this. We all do this with our own expertise. This gives you a North Star, a checklist ahead of time to be going through so you make sure you don't miss anything, which is super, super useful. And it also assures that you're applying a fair process across multiple evaluations of the same product or many different products depending on what your role happens to be. It came about from a usability designer named Jacob Nielsen in I think 1984 like early early a long time ago and so keep in mind this has been around for most of personal computing's history And you can do pretty much anything you want with it.
So for example, you can run through example tasks that you would be doing on your usability test, like checking out with a dummy credit card, going through your onboarding flow, adding a product to cart, doing things that are typical for what you would expect an interaction to happen on your site. And they're really, really useful, but they're not everything. They're a very good kind of first pass. I do heuristic evaluations first before I do anything else, but obviously it's not where you stop. The real work is in qualitative research.
So I always bristle at saying, hey, do a heuristic evaluation, and then everybody goes off and does that because it's the fun, easy thing, and then they don't do the actual work that's involved in the job. That is done at your peril, extremely done at your peril. You need to be figuring out other research methods beyond this. This is what you do when you get out of college and you're just learning how a website works. And so when you do that, you fix all the brainlessly easy things that people sort of normalized in an organization that might be busted deviant practices that we don't want to actually have happen.
But again, it's not everything, right? So, that's essentially the overall process. Now, for our heuristic evaluation checklist, we'll include a copy of this. I encourage you to adapt this for your own purposes because ours is very rooted in e-commerce and it may not be relevant or useful for your product. You can find example heuristic checklists elsewhere.
Again, you should adapt them to your process. That's the difference between a designer and an expert. If you want to be an expert, you'll create your own checklist over enough time and really understand how it operates. So with that in mind, that's heuristic evaluation. We recommend overall as a process, go through a given site, store, whatever it happens to be, and I'll give you a few examples, and write down at least three or four things that you think might be messed up with it, right?
And that's sort of using your intuition with it. It's not actually going through and doing a rigorous checklist-based heuristic evaluation. This works, this doesn't, this works, this works. Change this in this way. I like using B&H for this.
So if you go to bhphotovideo.com is a really good example because they have a whole usability department and a whole conversion department. They're an example of a store that works really, really well for this. Any sort of favorite e-commerce store. Glossier, glossier.com would be a really good one. Paul's Choice.com if you want another skincare one.
For peril, I like using Lululemon, because they've got a lot of custom things. So lululemon.com is another really good one. Again, I'm saying all of these just as writing prompts if you're having trouble figuring something out. If you want a good SaaS business, as an example, I would recommend, well, we can use my email platform, former client, ButtonDown, so buttondown.com. They're a really, really good one to be taking a look at and finding ways to improve them.
Take a look, find a few things that you think might be messed up about it, and then try to understand what you would do to try and fix those things. And then you've done a very, very simple slapdash heuristic evaluation. Again, we'll include our checklist. That process involves making that checklist, going through a given site with that checklist, saying yes, no, or change to absolutely every single thing, and then identifying things that you would be doing to fix those things. And with that in mind, that's a heuristic evaluation.
Time.
Next up, we'll be talking about a concept that sounds a little weird, but I assure you it's a great deal more familiar than you think. It's called heuristic evaluations. It's one of my favorite research methods, and it's something that I think a lot of people already kind of do. But it's a way of bringing a little bit more rigor and concreteness to the process that I think will really, really help level up your design practice. Heuristic evaluations are basically a three-step process where you go through a checklist that you've built ahead of time for your product and try to understand if there are any specific issues coming out of it.
It's a very, very easy three-step process. You make a checklist. You go through the site with a checklist. You identify issues and ways to fix it. It's really great for understanding things that are very just rigorous, quantitative, bug-based sort of things.
It's sort of a QA process for usability. And a lot of people already do this. They have within their own expertise a set of things that they just look at. So whenever I'm opening a page I look at your navigation, I look at your headline, I look at your call to action I look at your overall copy and organization on the home page. Then I might go in and click a few links and see how you've structured your pricing or organized your collections or whatever have you for whatever the site happens to be.
And we all do this. We all do this with our own expertise. This gives you a North Star, a checklist ahead of time to be going through so you make sure you don't miss anything, which is super, super useful. And it also assures that you're applying a fair process across multiple evaluations of the same product or many different products depending on what your role happens to be. It came about from a usability designer named Jacob Nielsen in I think 1984 like early early a long time ago and so keep in mind this has been around for most of personal computing's history And you can do pretty much anything you want with it.
So for example, you can run through example tasks that you would be doing on your usability test, like checking out with a dummy credit card, going through your onboarding flow, adding a product to cart, doing things that are typical for what you would expect an interaction to happen on your site. And they're really, really useful, but they're not everything. They're a very good kind of first pass. I do heuristic evaluations first before I do anything else, but obviously it's not where you stop. The real work is in qualitative research.
So I always bristle at saying, hey, do a heuristic evaluation, and then everybody goes off and does that because it's the fun, easy thing, and then they don't do the actual work that's involved in the job. That is done at your peril, extremely done at your peril. You need to be figuring out other research methods beyond this. This is what you do when you get out of college and you're just learning how a website works. And so when you do that, you fix all the brainlessly easy things that people sort of normalized in an organization that might be busted deviant practices that we don't want to actually have happen.
But again, it's not everything, right? So, that's essentially the overall process. Now, for our heuristic evaluation checklist, we'll include a copy of this. I encourage you to adapt this for your own purposes because ours is very rooted in e-commerce and it may not be relevant or useful for your product. You can find example heuristic checklists elsewhere.
Again, you should adapt them to your process. That's the difference between a designer and an expert. If you want to be an expert, you'll create your own checklist over enough time and really understand how it operates. So with that in mind, that's heuristic evaluation. We recommend overall as a process, go through a given site, store, whatever it happens to be, and I'll give you a few examples, and write down at least three or four things that you think might be messed up with it, right?
And that's sort of using your intuition with it. It's not actually going through and doing a rigorous checklist-based heuristic evaluation. This works, this doesn't, this works, this works. Change this in this way. I like using B&H for this.
So if you go to bhphotovideo.com is a really good example because they have a whole usability department and a whole conversion department. They're an example of a store that works really, really well for this. Any sort of favorite e-commerce store. Glossier, glossier.com would be a really good one. Paul's Choice.com if you want another skincare one.
For peril, I like using Lululemon, because they've got a lot of custom things. So lululemon.com is another really good one. Again, I'm saying all of these just as writing prompts if you're having trouble figuring something out. If you want a good SaaS business, as an example, I would recommend, well, we can use my email platform, former client, ButtonDown, so buttondown.com. They're a really, really good one to be taking a look at and finding ways to improve them.
Take a look, find a few things that you think might be messed up about it, and then try to understand what you would do to try and fix those things. And then you've done a very, very simple slapdash heuristic evaluation. Again, we'll include our checklist. That process involves making that checklist, going through a given site with that checklist, saying yes, no, or change to absolutely every single thing, and then identifying things that you would be doing to fix those things. And with that in mind, that's a heuristic evaluation.
Nick Disabato