Research shows that such evaluations can identify a majority of the usability problems, with the problem-identification percentage increasing as evaluators are added. Strengths of Heuristic Evaluation Heuristic evaluation is especially valuable when time and resources are short. Heuristic evaluation can enable many usability improvements to take place before a release deadline that would not permit usability testing. If the development team is open to new ideas, heuristic evaluation can be an excellent investment of usability resources. Tec-Ed evaluators can describe the research basis for heuristic evaluation, and we can manage expectations and write usable, explicit results reports.
Heuristic evaluation can also greatly increase the value of usability testing.
Earlier discovery of usability problems during the development cycle means less costly design changes. Without prior heuristic evaluation, usability test participants may spend half their sessions struggling with the same obvious usability problem. Other reasons why heuristic evaluation shouldn't replace studying actual users are that it rarely emulates all the key audience groups, and it doesn't necessarily indicate which problems users will encounter most frequently. Heuristic Evaluation Methodology Tec-Ed's methodology for performing heuristic evaluations is to create a team of usability specialists who apply their training and experience in human factors to perform independent evaluations of the user experience. Following published research data and industry-accepted usability principles, and using their experience from prior usability studies, the usability evaluators record their findings.