Work@WillPhillips.org

Heuristic Analysis Template Creation & Training

The Big Question

Heuristic reviews can be a powerful—and, more importantly, fast and cheap—method of validating design decisions, especially when compared against the time required to run proper usability tests.

But when most of a Design team, along with the small number of Researchers, is unfamiliar with heuristic reviews, what do you do?

Create a template and train your teams.

Context

My Role: Created a standard template for heuristic reviews along with a lunch-and-learn deck in which the whys and hows of this method were taught.
Client: Ibotta
Users: Internal members of the Ibotta team: product designers, UX researchers, and even a few interested product managers
Activities: Presentation design, workshop facilitation, training
Primary Tools: Office 365 & MS Teams, Miro

The Template

Why ask your team to create a wheel they are unfamiliar with when you know how the spokes and hubs go together?

I inherited a small UX Research team whose primary activity was partnering with Design to conduct usability testing… even when usability testing may not have been the best course of action.

Embracing a lean approach to our work, there were often times when a quick expert review would provide the valuable feedback a designer needed without the time and expense of a full usability test—even guerilla style quick and dirty ones.

I created a standard template for my researchers and our product design partners to use.

Example Heuristic Review Slides

One example of an itemized usability issue – something that could be provided to a designer or product manager for future work.
Another example of a usability issue screen.
The iconography was lifted from another online source: something about great artists stealing, right?

Training & Outcome

With the template created, I created a presentation deck and gathered industry references and guidance to train the Research, Design, and Product teams about heuristic reviews: when to conduct them (i.e. over usability tests), how to conduct them, and what to do about the results of such a review (as quick-turnaround feedback for designers or as items for a product manager to include in a backlog).

This training was held across several remote MS Teams sessions, with me personally providing input and encouragement for the teams as they began to conduct heuristic reviews on their own.

Best Practices Document

As part of the training, I wrote and shared a best practices document to go with the template. When combined with the coaching, researchers and designers would have all they need to start running heuristic reviews of their own.

Outcomes

Two key outcomes became apparent with the introduction of heuristic reviews into the playbook of our research and design teams:

  1. Designers were able to more quickly get feedback on their early designs, catching the most important and egregious usability issues before they were ever able to trip up actual users.
  2. Researchers gained a small amount of bandwidth back, freeing them up to focus on additional, more strategic efforts, when before they were conducting usability tests for most small mockups and early phase design explorations.
View more examples of work.