Definición RápidaA heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method in which one or more evaluators examine an interface and judge it against a set of recognized usability principles (the “heuristics”). The goal is to identify usability problems in the design.
What Is a Heuristic Evaluation?
Imagine you are a food critic visiting a restaurant. You are not a regular customer; you are an expert who evaluates the restaurant based on a set of established criteria: ingredient quality, presentation, service, ambiance, etc. At the end, you produce a report with your findings.
A heuristic evaluation is very similar. A group of usability experts (the designers) inspects an interface and evaluates it against a list of universally accepted usability principles (the “heuristics”). The most famous list is Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics.
Why Is It Important?
- It is fast and cheap: It does not require recruiting users, renting labs, or providing incentives. It can be done in a couple of days with the existing team.
- It finds many problems: It is a very effective way to find the most obvious and “low-hanging fruit” usability problems.
- It is a good starting point: It is a great technique to perform at the beginning of a redesign project to have an inventory of current problems.
Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics
This is the most widely used set of heuristics:
- Visibility of system status: The system should always keep users informed about what is going on.
- Match between system and the real world: The system should speak the user’s language.
- User control and freedom: Users should be able to undo and redo actions easily.
- Consistency and standards: Do not make users wonder whether different words or actions mean the same thing.
- Error prevention: It is better to prevent errors than to have good error messages.
- Recognition rather than recall: Make objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the interface to another.
- Flexibility and efficiency of use: Allow users to customize frequent actions. Accelerators (shortcuts) can speed up usage for experts.
- Aesthetic and minimalist design: Dialogs should not contain information that is irrelevant or rarely needed.
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error messages should be expressed in plain language, indicate the problem, and suggest a solution.
- Help and documentation: Although it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help.
How Is It Done?
- Choose the evaluators: It is recommended that 3 to 5 people evaluate the interface independently.
- Define the scope: What parts of the application will be evaluated?
- Perform the individual evaluation: Each evaluator navigates the interface and notes every usability problem they find, indicating which heuristic it violates and the severity of the problem (from 0 to 4).
- Consolidate the results: All findings are gathered into a single document, duplicates are removed, and problems are prioritized based on their severity.
- Create an actionable report: The final result should be a prioritized list of problems with clear recommendations on how to fix them.
Mentor Tips
- Multiple evaluators are better than one: A single evaluator will only find about a third of the problems. With 3-5 evaluators, you can find up to 75% of the problems.
- Evaluators must work separately: It is crucial that the evaluation is individual to ensure that one person’s opinions do not influence others.
- It is not a substitute for user testing: A heuristic evaluation tells you where there might be problems. A [[Usability Testing|usability test]] tells you where users actually have problems. Both techniques are complementary.
Resources and Tools
- Resources:
- 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design - Nielsen Norman Group (The original and fundamental article).
- Tools:
- A simple spreadsheet (Google Sheets, Excel) is all you need to record and consolidate findings.