How is a heuristic evaluation different from usability testing?

An evaluation is experts checking the interface against known principles — fast, cheap, no users needed. Testing observes real users attempting tasks. Evaluations catch known-bad patterns; testing catches the surprises. They complement, not compete.

Which heuristics are actually used?

Nielsen's ten remain the standard: visibility of status, real-world match, user control, consistency, error prevention, recognition over recall, flexibility, minimalist design, error recovery, and help. Teams often add domain-specific ones on top.

Heuristic Evaluation

An expert review of an interface against established usability principles (heuristics) to find problems without recruiting users.

Process & Methods

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.

In practice

Two reviewers independently walk a SaaS app against Nielsen's ten heuristics and log violations: no visible system status during a 20-second import, destructive actions without confirmation, error messages written for engineers. Merged and severity-ranked, the list holds 23 issues — six critical. Cost: two days, zero participant recruiting. The team fixes the criticals before spending a cent on usability testing, which then surfaces the problems experts couldn't predict.

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Heuristic Evaluation

In practice

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