Research method
UX Heuristic Review
A UX heuristic review in this context is a review of a website based on a set of guiding UX principles, with the aim to identify areas of potential UX friction (ultimately areas of the user experience that could be creating friction or barriers for users on that website). A UX Heuristic review can be conducted on any digital experience; from a full website or core user journey, through to a single page, a piece of functionality, or a design or prototype.
When to reach for it
A UX heuristic review is a good starting point for an experimentation programme or larger research project. This is a particularly effective option in the case of low traffic pages which making it difficult to run polls or analyze analytics data. A UX heuristic review can also be used when there's limited time / budget to run alternative user research activities.
Strengths and limits
Pros
A good starting point, particularly if you’re not very familiar with the website, e.g. you’re new to a business or working in an agency.
It’s relatively quick and inexpensive (no tool costs, only resource costs).
Can be used as an effective tool for encouraging collaboration across teams, and for helping build a culture of experimentation.
Identifies “low hanging fruit” such as bugs and JDIs.
Cons
Low strength of signal; insights aren’t based on real user data (therefore should not be used to validate high-risk business decisions).
Can be misused to push personal agendas, personal opinions, etc.
Additional research is (ideally) needed to support/validate insights.
Practical considerations
There are two steps involved in conducting a robust heuristic review; a group workshop and a scoring exercise conducted by a smaller team.
The group workshop is a great way to gather insights from a wide range of people in a short period of time. This is an effective way to help avoid personal opinion; as the workshop will focus on identifying the themes that come up across individuals and groups.
We recommend running the workshop with up to 10 people for between 1 hour and 1 hour 30 minutes. Assuming the workshop is being run remotely, you can use a tool like Miro or FigJam to run the workshop, if you're running it in person, you can use post-it notes instead.
Example agenda;
- Background & Intro - 10 mins
- Group breakout sessions:
Part 1 (solo review, note taking & classification) 20 mins
Part 2 (discuss & agree top 3) 10 mins
- Each group present back top 3-5 / group discussion - 20 mins
Next, is the scoring matrix. This is where a smaller project team dig further into the detail. This can also help validate what was discovered in the workshop. This involves up to 5 people scoring the user experience in a spreadsheet against a set of UX guidelines (see example in Resources).
Common tools
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Recipes that use this method
A method earns its value when its signal corroborates others. Here is where this one does its work.
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