Method
Assess the effectiveness of a product against established design and content standards.
Purpose
- To learn how a product performs against digital design standards.
- To identify problems with the user-interface or content.
- To establish a benchmark against which to measure incremental improvements.
What you get
- Feedback on how a digital product measures up against design standards.
- A set of issues that can be investigated and resolved by the product team in a systematic way.
Strengths
- A way to get fast feedback from an expert in user experience.
- Several evaluations can be done at different times throughout the iterative design process.
- Complements other research, such as user testing.
Weaknesses
- Heuristic evaluation should done instead of user testing with current or prospective users.
- Findings from the evaluation are only related to the product’s current design.
- Not useful for informing the product design at a strategic level.
Tips
An experienced user-experience (UX) practitioner should do the evaluation. This person must know how to assess the product against well-established principles and standards.
The standards include:
- The Victorian Government Digital Standards
- Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) standards
Toolkits and resources
Updated