A New Framework for UX Heuristics
Earlier this week I had a check in with a UX Designer I had a hand in training before we hired her at the Studio. Being a new transfer into the field, she likes to check with me when she faces a challenge for the first time. Deb Zell recently asked her to do some heuristic reporting on several inbound projects. The question that came up in our meeting was essentially “how do I report on this in a way that moves us forward?” — and I had to admit the existing structures were creating a lot of noise without a clear signal.
Thanks Ranjitha, that was an excellent question. I think I’ll write about it.
There’s an article on how to run a heuristic evaluation at UX Mastery, which does a solid job of outlining the classic process. If you’re feeling the Susan Weinschenk angle on heuristics (The Psychologist’s View of UX Design), Jordisan has crafted a great Google Sheets project around her work. As I started to relay all of this information to Ranjitha though, I realized all I was doing was giving her a more structured way to output raw data.
The mark of a professional UX researcher is an ability to report not just results, but useful insight along with next steps. I’ve got a method for doing that but I’ve never written about it before. Also hey everyone, thanks for reading.
What follows rests heavily on the shoulders of UX giants, all I’ve done is restructure their work.
When I run a heuristic evaluation I frame the entire thing around an intersection of user needs and business goals, which are expressed as a series of value propositions. Those of you who are familiar with my work in the broader UX community will recognize that as a the same value framework produced by Ideo’s lenses of human-centered design, which I spend a lot of time talking about. That’s intentional. It also serves as a great way to explain what a UX Designer actually does, in case your mom asks again.
Because we want to frame a heuristic evaluation around value, we open up with a mission statement:
Restatement of design objective & behavioral goals
- Identify the opportunity or problem statement being resolved
- Identify the business goals
- Identify the user actions required to support those goals
The UX professionals in the room will recognize this as a major component of a creative brief. Whether kicking off a new project or evaluating an existing one it’s important that we:
- Identify a problem or opportunity set (as experienced by the user)
- Articulate how that’s relevant to the business (conversion goals)
- Understand what actions the user has to take to fulfill those goals (the user journey)
Everything else that follows serves this mission, including how the design heuristics are evaluated. This is a foundational tenant of goal directed design.
There’s a second problem though.
Classic heuristics are framed entirely around psychological concepts. They are wonderfully descriptive but often difficult to convert into actionable insight. On a design team we take action on specific areas:
- Information Design
- Interaction Design
- Funnel Design
- Visual Design
- Content Design
- Accessibility Design
So when a designer like Ranjitha reports on a Weinschenk metric like “In every moment, just the indispensable information is provided on the screen” under a category called “People have limitations” — how is that actionable?
How do we un-limit these poor folks?
As it turns out, the concept breaks out into multiple metrics under several categories
Information Design
- Flow of information is matched to to user task flow
- Provides immediate, transparent access to mission-critical or frequently needed information.
- Expository text is kept to a minimum
- Additional information is available on demand instead of by default (firehose effect)
Interaction Design
- The hierarchy of influence between elements is clearly apparent (Gestalt psychology)
- The most common/important functions are easiest to find (Pareto principle)
Funnel Design
- The funnel is well structured and meets the high level UX goals (funnel optimization)
- System appears to match the user’s mental models
Content Design
- Section titles are clear and descriptive
- Copy is written using familiar terminology
- Copy eschews the use of tropes that the reader may consider kitchey or inauthentic
- Linked resources do not pull the user out of an action funnel
- The experience uses consistent terminology
Violating any one of the listed bullets will cause non-essential information to appear, thus increasing cognitive load and reducing the likelihood of continued engagement or conversion. Trying to figure out how to report on a heuristic like “In every moment, just the indispensable information is provided on the screen” becomes incredibly complex as a result.
On the other hand if the main problems are failing grades on “expository text is kept to a minimum” and “linked resources do not pull the user out of an action funnel” there’s a laser-beam tight path from the heuristic to a proposed solution.
What we’ve now done is familiar to anyone who has worked on an Agile team: we’ve taken a broad set of Weinschenk metrics (epics) and broken them into task-oriented bite-sized chunks (stories). The idea is that we get at all the same psychological data but do it in a way that suggests a path forward.
The goal is to generate actionable insight. So far it’s working pretty well.
“Okay Ian, where’s something I can use?”
Oh right. That.
This is an ongoing project at the studio, so I don’t have a pretty application that you can fire up just yet. In fact I can’t even guarantee there won’t be significant changes to the document over the next few weeks — but we’ve got a living document (a draft) up in Quip that is receiving daily edits.
That’s not something I mind sharing: https://dell.quip.com/LVNCAbmJW7ox
If you have anything to add, please don’t hesitate to mention it in the comments below!
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At the time of this publication, I am a Principal UX Designer at Dell EMC’s Digital Marketing Studio in San Francisco. I learned HTML in 1997 and built my first commercial web experience in 1999. Professional designers and entrepreneurs can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
