Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces

Heuristic evaluation is an informal method of usability analysis where a number of evaluators are presented with an interface design and asked to comment on it. Four ex-periments showed that individual evaluators were mostly quite bad at doing such heuristic evaluations and that they only found between 20 and 51 % of the usability problems in the interfaces they evaluated. On the other hand, we could aggregate the evaluations from several evaluators to a single evaluation and such aggregates do rather well, even when they consist of only three to five people.