I am making a software project within one of the university's courses with the focus on the UX and came across the term heuristic evaluation, which could be pretty nice idea to use for evaluation of the UI. Obviously, as a student making a small project for the university I can't hire any usability experts, I also don't have any such expert among colleagues etc... Can the heuristic evaluation be done by myself?
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Does this answer your question? How to run heuristic evaluation– Erhan YaşarCommented Mar 9, 2020 at 8:52
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Of course, you can do it yourself, but don't expect a result similar to an experienced UX professional's work. If you are not good at something, then the result will be mediocre. that's common sense.– Sooraj MVCommented Mar 9, 2020 at 10:39
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1 Answer
You can. Heuristic Evaluations are not hard to do. However, you would benefit from having somebody else do it.
Developers tend to have a bias in favor of their application, and this is not at all intentional: it´s because they know the flows inside out. With a usability inspection, you are trying to see if the application is easy to use, the actions communicate intentions correctly, or if the system breaks any of the other rules or heuristics you will be following during the HE.
Having more than one person do it is known to help find the most issues (at least 5 is recommended, see: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/). Remember that at the end of the cycle of evaluations, results are tallied and then an average result is given for each of the problems.
Now, since you are a student, what I recommend is that you review Nielsen´s Heuristic and keep them in mind during your designs. And you don´t need to be an expert to do the actual HE, just knowledge of the heuristics and how to conduct the evaluation.
answered Mar 10, 2020 at 6:20
