Cracking the Heuristic Evaluation for your product!
If you have been in the field of design, chances are you must have come across this term a number of times. While some continues to ignore it, it’s importance is much recognized by those who have a knack for building user-centric products. Let’s dive deep into this to know the how, when and what of Heuristic Evaluation. To understand better, a small case study is also given at the end.
1. What is Heuristic Evaluation?
Heuristic Evaluation is a method for finding the usability issues in a product. Once addressed, the solution comes as the next part of the process that results in a better user experience. The product, be any software, app or website, is assessed under standard design guidelines or UX practices or heuristics, hence the name heuristic evaluation.
2. Why is it required?
According to a report, atleast one-forth of the apps are used only once. Mostly because they arn’t able to meet the expectations of the users. A good intention and idea alone does not contribute to the making of a successful app or website. An optimsed product with very few usuability problems not only helps in retaining your users who install the apps, it also improves the conversion rate.
3. Who performs it?
HE is done by expert professionals and not the actual users. It is different from user testing.
4. What are the standard guidelines for conducting heuristic evaluation?
To test the usability of a product, different sets of standard UX practices are taken into account.
One set includes that of Jakob Neilson’s 10 principles for Interaction Design. 5 of them are attached here:
Visibility of system status
The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.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.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.Consistency and standards
Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing.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.
You can find more in this link.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/
Other sets of heuristics has been beautifully covered in one of the blogs by Springboard.
https://www.springboard.com/blog/heuristic-evaluation-in-ux/
5. What is the process to do HE?
Before getting started, it is essential that the common goal of the product/business is familiarised. Generally, evaluators assess a doubtful interface properly with their assumptions and comparing it with the sets of UX practices or heuristics, yeilding to the suspected usability problems. The evalutors work individually and after thorough research present their findings. A report is made about which issues need more attention considering the severity of the problem. Then the group of UX researches work together in brainstorming sessions to workout the favourable solutions. As per the research, on an average 3 - 5 evaluators work on a screen and in the process are able to identify 75% usability problems. It is essential that more than one should necessarily participate in this exercise to rule out the possibility of biasness.
6. When is it required to do HE?
Straightforward answer- at any point of time. Generally the process is long, time expensive and tiring and therefore, it often gets ignored at the cost of developing softwares that inhibits usability problems. It is a good practise to conduct heurestic evaluation in the start of the product development process. In this way, the problems can be recognized and solved using pen and paper mode without undergoing rigorous changes in the technicalities of the app.
Let’s understand this method with a real app example
A bit of a background: My two friends and I together developed a social media based app to help people at achieving their aspirations. I looked after the UI/UX design of the app. I must admit when I started this out, I had little knowledge about UI/UX. I did it mostly because I was enjoying the designing part. After constant efforts, we were able to come up with a fairly decent user interface for the app. The app is on playstore.
It would be fun in finding the usability problems in our app. We will be taking the help of Neilson Norman’s design guidelines.
Consistency and standards
Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing.
- Design system: The font sizes that I have at various places is varying. There is not a consistency about the font size of headings, subheadings and paragraph. Even the colors could not bring any harmoniosity to the app.
- Stars: Two kinds of stars I have used in the app- one is anologous to points that you earn in a game. The other star is anologous to the user ratings as in playstore only the fact that you can rate a post in the feed. This thing was totally confusing to the users and in no way abided to the consistency heuristics.
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.
- Onboarding: Whenever a new user enters our app, it was essential for us to capture his attention and communicate the idea of the app within seconds. Hence, we used UnDraw illustrations that has human figures to express.
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.
- An error message is displayed when a person views the feed from the people he is following. We suggested a solution for it by asking them to discover other people in the app.
Caution:
One thing to be kept in mind is that HE in no way makes any product perfect. It reduces the possibility of errors. It is an essential part of the ever-evolving iterative design process.
Also, HE is based heavily on the heuristics that are defined and chosen over years of practice and experimentation. Once if they are misinterpreted, they might result in biased results. So the key here is that as each product is unique in itself and targets a varieties of audiences/customers, it might be possible what one applies in a general case might not be the same with this. Sometimes, the method is combined with user testing to truly check the results.
Credits: Interaction Design Foundation, Springboard Blog, NNGroup
I hope this has made you learn new things in the very least. Thankyou! Coffee anyone?☕