Heuristic Evaluation
An expert review of an interface against established usability principles (heuristics) to find problems without recruiting users.
In a heuristic evaluation, one or more specialists inspect a product against a known set of rules — most famously Nielsen's ten heuristics, covering things like system status visibility, error prevention, and consistency. Each violation is logged and rated by severity.
It is fast and cheap because it needs no participants, which makes it a natural first pass in a UX audit. Its blind spot is that experts are not your users; heuristics catch known-bad patterns but miss the surprises that only usability testing with real people reveals. The two methods are complementary, not interchangeable.
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Related terms
Usability TestingWatching real users attempt real tasks in a product or prototype to find where they struggle, hesitate, or fail.UX AuditA structured expert review of a product's user experience that identifies usability problems and prioritizes fixes by impact.User ResearchThe systematic study of users' needs, behaviors, and pain points — through interviews, surveys, and observation — to ground design in evidence.