Heuristic Evaluation

Identify Needs

You may have received some feedback about your website suggesting that it needs to be improved in certain areas, alternatively you may have identified problems that you think exist but you're not sure about how to go about fixing them.

You stand a much better chance of correctly identifying and fixing problems if you carry out some form of user-centred testing and evaluation rather than by attempting to fix the problems without fully understanding them.

Meeting

We can help you by turning your needs into a plan of action that will fulfill the need. To do this, you should phone us on 0845 230 3760 to set up a meeting. More information can be found on our contact us page

During the meeting we will discuss your business goals, your customers and what you want to achieve. We will outline alternative courses of action, one of which may be to carry out an heuristic evaluation.

If everyone agrees that a heuristic evaluation is an appropriate course of action, we will look at your website and agree on the areas that will be tested.

Identify Processes

Having agreed on areas of the site that need to be tested, we will then identify and agree on some specific processes to evaluate. For example, in an ecommerce site we might decide to concentrate on the checkout process.

Evaluation

Once the processes to be evaluated have been identified, at least two evaluators will independently carry out an analysis using their knowledge and experience to assess the processes against certain predetermined usability heuristics. The heuristics used will most likely be Jakob Nielson's ten recommended usability heuristics.

Report

After the analysis the evaluators will compare and combine their findings and will produce a written report detailing the areas where the site isn't as usable as it could be and providing brief explanations as to why this might be. The report will highlight those usability issues which the evaluators consider to be most severe.

The report won't contain detailed recommendations about how to implement solutions to usability problems but, where possible, the evaluators will make broad suggestions about ways in which usability could be improved.

What Happens Next

On delivery of the report you will then be in a position to make accurate and informed decisions about the areas of your site that you need to attend to, the order in which they should be attended to and, to some extent, what needs to be done.