Making Heuristic Evaluations Work For You
By: Alison Berent-Spillson
Tags: Design, Usability, Product Management, UX, User Research

Do heuristic criteria work for your project?

Evaluating a design against defined heuristics can almost always uncover a number of usability issues. While a heuristic evaluation should probably not be the only evaluative step in an iterative design process, there are unarguable benefits to the process, which can provide a great return on fairly minimal investment of time and resources.

While Nielsen’s usability criteria are right for many circumstances, the 10 specific heuristics are not the right criteria for every situation, and it is likely that they are not entirely right for your design. These criteria are often considered the standard for modern software design, but it is often appropriate to modify or adapt the usability heuristics used to evaluate a given design.

How to create appropriate usability heuristics for your project

Because Nielsen’s criteria are close to universally applicable, they provide a good base from which to adapt to the specific needs of your project. There are two primary steps to this process:

1. Evaluate the usability requirements of your project against Nielsen’s heuristics

The first step in evaluating appropriate heuristic criteria for your project is to have a thorough understanding of your users, and why and how they will be using your design. You should have a firm grasp on who your users are likely to be, the different roles they will have in accessing the system, why they are using the system, what goals they will try to achieve with the design, and the likely task flows for each type of user and user goals. With this information, you can determine how well each of Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics apply to your system given what you know about your users and how they will use your software.

As an example, I am a UX researcher at a company that creates electronic health records software. By necessity, our clinic-facing systems are very large and complex in the amount of information and number of functions and interactions available to our users. It would be unrealistic to expect this software to be designed so that a new user, or user without relevant medical training, could learn to use the system with minimal documentation. Because our users have many types of user roles and a great many possible goals for using our software, and because they often require a large amount of information to be available and visible, it is appropriate for us to take a closer look at how we evaluate usability criteria for a minimalist design, and how we evaluate the usability of our help and documentation.

In some situations, it may also be necessary to balance usability criteria against other requirements. To expand on my example above, in a clinic-facing system, it may be necessary to balance the amount of information required by users with the visibility of that information, and relative visibility of other available actions and options. Thus, it is appropriate for us to determine how much to emphasize the usability criteria for recognition of available actions and options in our system.

2. Modify Nielsen’s heuristics to meet the requirements of your project

The initial evaluation of heuristic criteria will give you an idea of where there might be discrepancies between Nielsen’s criteria and your specific case. These potential conflicts are areas for which you may need to modify heuristic criteria to ensure optimal usability.

Heuristics modifications may include:

Adapt heuristic criteria

In most cases, Nielsen’s heuristic criteria will apply to your design. However the specifics against which you evaluate that criteria may be slightly different than they would be for a more generalized piece of software. In these cases, you can often keep the heuristic in your evaluative criteria, with slight modifications to make it more appropriate to your system.

Qualify heuristic criteria

Similar to adapting criteria, you may determine that a particular criterium is appropriate to your design, if appropriately qualified to the situation.

For example, to evaluate my electronic health records software, I might want to qualify what will satisfy the heuristic of ‘recognition rather than recall’. In this case, it may be appropriate to specify that users may only be able to recognize available actions if they have relevant clinical training.

Expand heuristic criteria

There may be one or more usability criterium that are especially relevant to a particular piece of software. In these cases, it may be appropriate to expand a particular heuristic to capture the essential usability targets, or even break a heuristic into distinct pieces covering that theme.

A good example of expanding a heuristic criteria can be found in a description of developing a complete set of evaluative criteria around learning to use Autodesk products. Some of the Autodesk team members involved with this project wrote a nice blog post describing the process.

Add heuristic criteria

After evaluating a given design and its user, you may determine that Nielsen’s heuristic criteria don’t adequately cover everything necessary for your design to be usable. Or, you may find that you want to keep a criterium as-is, but also adapt a version to cover slightly different criteria. In these cases, you may want to define a new criterium to cover the specific usability requirement.

Autodesk’s “learnability” requirement is again a good example of adding a heuristic criterium. While related to the Nielsen criteria for “recognition rather than recall” and “help and documentation”, in Autodesk’s specific situation “learnability” is important enough to stand alone as a separate and distinct criterium.

Eliminate irrelevant heuristic criteria

In a smaller number of situations, it may be clear that a heuristic criterium simply isn’t applicable. Rather than try to find a way to evaluate against it anyway, it may be better to eliminate that heuristic and focus on the more relevant usability requirements.