Recommended by Fabricio Teixeira and 298 others

Norbi Gaal Follow

I m a geek who UX, Product strategy, Business & management. @norbigaal | working @intellyo
Jun 19 6 min read

Heuristic Analysis in the design process

Three usability inspection methods and when and how use
each one

Heuristic analysis is an extremely useful usability inspection method,

but we need to find the best time and place to use it in the design
process. UX has many methods, techniques and tools, but if we dont
know exactly how to use them the ROI (benefit) will be negative. We
need to clarify the 3 most important usability inspection methods and
understand the relationships between them. Then you can make an in-
formed decision as to which method is right for your design process.

Heuristic analysis UX
Heuristic analysis is a technique used in the User Experience design
process to test usability. It gives you a comprehensive status of the UIs
usability. 35 usability experts will review the product and compare it
against pre-defined principles (the heuristics). From this, we can high-
light any usability issues before user testing. Which is great, as it will
cut down on obvious errors and improve the testing process.

Heuristics examples:
The most commonly used heuristics include:

Jacob Nielsens Heuristics for User Interface Design

Ben Shneidermans Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design

Jill Gerhardt-Powals 10 Cognitive Engineering Principles

Christian Bastien and Dominique Scapin 18 Ergonomic criteria

for the evaluation of human-computer interfaces

Bruce Tognazzinis First principles of interaction design

William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butlers Universal

principles of design

Alan Coopers About face 2.0: The essentials of interaction

design.

One of the most famous heuristics came from Jacob Nielsen and Rolf
Molich in 1990. This is still the most used heuristic in usability
inspection.
Another good example for heuristics is when Susan Weinschenk and
Dean Barker (Weinschenk and Barker 2000) researched usability
heuristics from many sources. They produced a list based upon that
(Je Sauro):

User Control: The interface will allow the user to perceive that
they are in control and will allow appropriate control.

Human Limitations: The interface will not overload the users

cognitive, visual, auditory, tactile, or motor limits.
 Modal Integrity: The interface will fit individual tasks within
whatever modality is being used: auditory, visual, or
motor/kinesthetic.

Accommodation: The interface will fit the way each user group
works and thinks.

Linguistic Clarity: The interface will communicate as eciently as

possible.

Aesthetic Integrity: The interface will have an attractive and ap-

propriate design.

Simplicity: The interface will present elements simply.

Predictability: The interface will behave in a manner such that

users can accurately predict what will happen next.

Interpretation: The interface will make reasonable guesses about

what the user is trying to do.

Accuracy: The interface will be free from errors

Technical Clarity: The interface will have the highest possible

fidelity.

Flexibility: The interface will allow the user to adjust the design
for custom use.

Fulfillment: The interface will provide a satisfying user

experience.

Cultural Propriety: The interface will match the users social cus-
toms and expectations.

Suitable Tempo: The interface will operate at a tempo suitable to

the user.

Consistency: The interface will be consistent.

User Support: The interface will provide additional assistance as

needed or requested.

Precision: The interface will allow the users to perform a task

exactly.

Forgiveness: The interface will make actions recoverable.

 Responsiveness: The interface will inform users about the results
of their actions and the interfaces status.

Advantages of heuristic analysis:

It can be quick and cost eective if there are internal resources;

It can be used early in the design process (even in wireframes);

It can give a comprehensive usability status of a products UI;

With the right heuristic measurement, the best corrections can be

made;

It can be used together with other usability testing methods;

Afterwards, usability testing can further examine potential issues.

How to run a heuristic analysis?

Planning:
Collect the UI you want to test;

A minimum of 3 experts are recommended;

Define the heuristics you want to use.

Before you start:

Without any groundwork or research, heuristic analysis will not be
100% accurate.

You need to know and understand the business and user needs of
the product/system, and how they are aligned with each other;

You should be up to date with existing research results such as

stakeholder interviews, user research, questionnaires, personas,
user journey maps and scenarios;

You need to understand user motivation, what tasks they want to

accomplish, and what their main goals are.

Method:
 1. Define and choose the heuristics you want to use. If you dont
know, I would recommend Neilsens or Gerhardt-Powals.

2. Select your evaluators. They should have experience in usability /

UX, and you should give them all the same training on principles
and processes to ensure theyre interpreting the heuristics
correctly.

3. Set up a consistent evaluation system (critical issue, normal issue,

minor issue, good practice), or trac light scheme (red, orange,
yellow, green), and make sure the experts understand them.

4. Highlight where the problem is (the page/screen, location on the

page) and how big a problem it is (rating scale)

5. Compare and analyse results from the multiple experts. The bene-
fit of having multiple experts is that they will likely find many of
the same errors, but they each will find some issues the others
have missed. I would not recommend to use more than 35 experts
because the results wont likely be statistically significant.

What is the difference between heuristic

analysis and cognitive walkthrough
The cognitive walkthrough is a task focused heuristic evaluation
method where also one or more usability experts work through a series
of tasks and ask a set of questions from the user perspective. The
method derive from the notion that users prefer to learn a system by
using it to accomplish tasks, rather than studying a manual.

The four questions to ask in a cognitive

walkthrough:
Blackmon, Polson, in their paper Cognitive walkthrough for the Web
oer four questions to be used by an evaluator during a cognitive
walkthrough:

Will the user try and achieve the right outcome?

Will the user notice that the correct action is available to them?

Will the user associate the correct action with the outcome they
expect to achieve?
 If the correct action is performed; will the user see that progress is
being made towards their intended outcome?

You ask these questions before, during and after each step in the happy
path. If you find an issue, you make a note and then move on to the
next step of the task.

How heuristic analysis and user testing

relate to each other?
There are some opinions which try to compare these two dierent UX
techniques. The truth is that we can not compare them, because both of
them give us a dierent insight and feedback about our product.

Both Heuristic analysis and cognitive walkthrough are

good to go as soon as the first design iteration is ready
(Starting with the wireframes). Once their
recommendations have been implemented, you can
start user testing.

If we know the dierence between these techniques we can use them

on the best place.

Now we understand the dierences between these usability inspection

methods, you can start implementing them in your design process. Use
them early and often in your design process and reap the benefits of a
better user experience.
If you have any thoughts dont hesitate to email me, or leave a com-
ment below.

. . .

Originally published at blog.intellyo.com.

Norbi wrote this story to share knowledge and to help nurture the design
community. All articles published on uxdesign.cc follow that same philoso-
phy.