Usability · Intermediate · 1 h 15 min
Audit an interface against usability heuristics
Use Nielsen's ten usability heuristics to evaluate a real app and prioritise what to fix.
Context
Heuristic evaluation is a fast expert review: you check an interface against established principles to find likely problems before (or between) usability tests. It does not replace testing with users, because experts miss problems and also flag issues users do not experience.
Your prompt
Pick one task in a real app or website (for example "change your delivery address") and evaluate it against all ten heuristics.
Instructions
- Read Nielsen Norman Group's description of the ten heuristics (linked in the resource library).
- Choose one task and complete it twice: once normally, once looking for problems.
- For each heuristic, note any violations with a screenshot.
- Rate each issue: 0 not a problem, 1 cosmetic, 2 minor, 3 major, 4 catastrophic.
- Combine duplicate issues and sort by severity.
- Recommend fixes for the top five.
- State the limitations of your audit.
Expected deliverables
- An issue table with heuristic, evidence, severity and recommendation
- A one-paragraph summary of the top five issues
Completion checklist
4 items
Evaluation criteria
- Issues correctly mapped to heuristics.
- Recommendations address causes, not symptoms.
- Prioritisation is defensible.
Hints and an illustrative solution
Show hints
- Several evaluators working independently find more problems than one; ask a friend to do it too and compare.
- "Visibility of system status" issues often appear during loading, saving and sending.
Show one possible solution
This is one reasonable answer, not the only one. Compare reasoning, not pixels.
Example rows: "Help users recognise, diagnose and recover from errors (3): entering a postcode with a space shows 'Error 422' and clears the field. Recommendation: accept postcodes with or without spaces, and show 'Enter a full postcode, like KT1 1AA' when it is genuinely invalid." "Visibility of system status (2): after tapping Save there is no confirmation, so users tap again and create duplicate addresses. Recommendation: show a saved confirmation and disable the button while saving."