November

Learn how to conduct goal-based expert usability reviews to quickly spot issues and build a better UX backlog

Brian Cloward

Senior UX Product Design Leader and UX Practices Coach

Heuristic Evaluations for Product Teams

Mayo Clinic

Autotrader

Kelley Blue Book

Equifax

Product teams often get into a routine of adding more and more features to a product and miss opportunities to address performance concerns or improve the usability of the primary purpose of the product. Without data and metrics, it can be hard to justify backlog features that address these things. Moderated and unmoderated user research can help spot usability concerns but a heuristic evaluation is a fast, cost-effective way to pin-point usability issues based on a definitive set of principles to ensure fundamental user experience of the product is achieved. In this hands-on course, you'll learn how to conduct a comprehensive and powerful usability audit method that helps identify usability concerns to ensure your product remains user-friendly and accessible for all. Whether you're a product leader, UX professional, or developer, this course will equip you with the skills to perform a structured and comprehensive heuristic evaluation. You'll learn how to evaluate digital products through the eyes of your users, uncover and document common usability issues, and provide actionable insights that will improve both usability and product success. What You'll Learn:﻿* The fundamentals of heuristic evaluation, its benefits, and how it can become one of the primary tools in your research arsenal.* How to create a persona and test scenario to simulate real-world user tasks for this evaluation.* A step-by-step walkthrough of the essential usability factors that will serve as the basis of your evaluation.* Techniques for scoring and summarizing findings, so you can present clear and actionable recommendations to stakeholders. Why Take This Course? 1. Avoid feature bloat - Help your product team achieve a better balance of new capabilities and usability improvements instilling a core set of best-practices and fundamental usability principles.2. Identify issues quickly - This structured activity enables you to assess problems in the user journey efficiently, ensuring your product’s usability stays top-of-mind for everyone.3. Reduce user research costs - User research can be time-consuming and expensive and often goes deep into understanding a specific capability. Diversify and broaden your research method toolkit by including a heuristic evaluation to spot usability issues that can help identify future research opportunities. By the end of this course, you'll be able to confidently conduct heuristic evaluations on any digital product, identify critical usability issues, provide actionable feedback, educate your team on usability principles, and present your findings in a compelling, data-driven way that resonates with both stakeholders and development teams. If that sounds interesting to you, please read on.

UX Designers, Researchers, and Product Leaders who are looking to quickly and cost-effectively identify usability issues in their product.

Beginner, intermediate, and advanced UX &amp; research professionals looking to include a heuristic evaluation as part their research toolkit.

Product Teams looking for data points to support usability improvements to balance the product backlog.

Who this course is for

What you’ll get out of this course

We will discuss the importance of incorporating an expert review as part of your product team discovery work.<ul><li>Common research methods and when to include a review</li><li>Cost-benefit analysis, effort, and planning essentials</li><li>Why this structured framework works better than any other</li></ul>

Review the available frameworks out there and how to add a heuristic evaluation to your UX research arsenal

Setup your worksheet and review the key elements needed to begin an evaluation.<ul><li>Essentials when selecting a system to evaluate</li><li>Discuss fears, attitudes, needs and goals for generating a proto persona</li><li>Define your test scenario and task to evaluate your product with</li></ul>

Develop a "FANG" proto persona, scenario, and goal to use for your evaluations

Master each factor of this 15-point heuristic framework and conduct an expert review using an example scenario.<ul><li>Learn the scoring system with numerous use cases</li><li>Effectively document your findings and score them</li><li>Tips working as a team or individually</li></ul>

Complete an comprehensive example evaluation learning each usability factor for this principles framework

Become a usability thought-leader in for your product team and your organization<ul><li>Apply your knowledge of product usability evaluation to all digital products</li><li>Ensure usability and performance are part of your product backlog</li><li>Build better UX research plans</li></ul>

Build a more balanced product backlog ensuring usability and performance are top-of-mind by your team and stakeholders

Next steps and follow-through are critical to put this data to work for you<ul><li>Tips discussing the findings with your product team</li><li>How to customize and iterate upon this framework</li><li>Finish this course with a completed heuristic and the knowledge to bring back to your team</li></ul>

Review your own heuristic evaluations with live Q&A so you can immediately apply your learning to existing initiatives

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

Course syllabus

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Meet your instructor

Discuss the importance of this cost-effective method of research and how to add it into your arsenal of UX research practices. We will see other heuristic evaluation approaches available today and why this framework is the very best for conducting an expert review.

Monday, June 30, 2025

We will learn the practice of conducting a heuristic evaluation using a comprehensive usability evaluation framework. This will be a live session where I will walk you through the first half of the the principles and we will review some examples.

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

We will finish the example heuristic evaluation review together, cover the remainder of the usability principles from this framework. Finally we will discuss how we include these finding in our UX backlogs and discuss our homework assignment for our last class together.

Monday, July 7, 2025

Individuals or teams will complete their own heuristic evaluations to review together with the class.

📝 Homework Assignment

A live Q&amp;A session to review your heuristic evaluations and I will offer feedback and answer any questions.

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Course schedule

This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects

Active hands-on learning

You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and project teams

Interactive and project-based

Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you

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