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Heuristic Evaluation Usability Testing

A heuristic evaluation is one of the more popular methods of usability testing and takes place with a functional website, likely in the last stages of development or right before a redesign. This is the type of lab setting that we showed you in Monday’s tip How to Conduct a Usability Lab, and requires a

Heuristic Evaluation (one-on-one)

A heuristic evaluation is one of the more popular methods of usability testing and takes place with a functional website, likely in the last stages of development or right before a redesign. This is the type of lab setting that we showed you in Monday’s tip How to Conduct a Usability Lab, and requires a computer with a webcam and usability software like Morae, a moderator, and a user.

In this usability test, you are required to come up with 5-10 major tasks such as:

  • Subscribe to the email newsletter
  • Download a free report
  • Subscribe to the RSS feed
  • Purchase a book
  • Unsubscribe from email list

The user is then recorded via webcam and the usability software while being timed performing each task. You will want to set a time limit for each task, from 60 seconds to three minutes. In general, if a user takes three minutes to find and subscribe to an email newsletter, the site has failed this task. Come up with a scorecard to document these times and scores.

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By Amanda MacArthur

Research Director & Managing Editor

Amanda is responsible for all the articles you read on the Mequoda Daily portal and every email newsletter delivered to your inbox from us. She is also our in-house social media expert and would love to chat with you over on @Mequoda. She has worked with Mequoda for almost a decade, helping to evolve the Mequoda Method through research, testing and developing new best practices in digital publishing, editorial strategy, email marketing and audience development. Amanda is a co-author of our four digital publishing handbooks.

Co-authored handbooks:

Contact Amanda:

Contact Amanda via email at amanda (at) mequoda (dot) com, @amaaanda, LinkedIn, and Google+.

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