Rules of thumb

A heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method that helps identify problems in a product’s UX/UI design. We provide a heuristic evaluation – or expert review – of products and systems by evaluating its design against established best practices, a.k.a. heuristics, and reporting our findings to clients.

While a heuristic analysis may cover hundreds of factors, our baseline includes:

• Home Page: the home page is an organization’s face to the world and the point at which users interact with an organization. It must balance showing the range of items on offer and simplifying the content to ensure that most customers can easily embark on the most common tasks.
• Task Orientation: People go to websites to achieve particular goals, not to look around and admire the design. This means web pages need to support customer tasks. A site is task-oriented when it supports users in the effective and efficient completion of their tasks.
• Navigation & IA: Navigation and information architecture are the components of web pages that support the user in finding information and in browsing through the site’s content. A well-designed navigation system is more than a good taxonomy: it encourages customers to explore parts of the site they may otherwise have missed.
• Forms & Data Entry: Forms are the components of a site that allow the customer to interact with the organization. Well-designed forms provide access to rich functionality while asking for the minimum of input from the customer.
• Trust & Credibility: A site has credibility when customers trust the content and the organization behind it. This is critical in forming customers’ opinions of the brand.
• Writing & Content Quality: Writing for the web or mobile differs from writing for print. People read differently depending on the medium, and the smaller the screen, the higher the expectation to scan content pages for information.
• Page Layout & Visual Design: The checkpoints in this area ask if the dialogue is aesthetic and minimalist. Appropriate visual design means that the fonts, icons, colors, and layout help the customer complete common tasks and that pages do not contain information that is irrelevant or rarely needed.

Photo by Aleksander Naug on Unsplash