Sometimes you know your website has issues, but you’re not sure precisely what they are or how to prioritize fixing them. Enter the heuristic evaluation—a systematic way to review your site against proven best practices and uncover problems that might be hiding in plain sight.

A heuristic evaluation is when an experienced reviewer (that could be you!) walks through your website using a structured set of guidelines. It’s like giving your site a thorough physical exam before deciding what needs treatment first.

What could this mean in practice?

• Start with real user scenarios. Don’t just click around randomly. Create specific scenarios like “Maria is facing eviction next week and needs immediate legal help. She’s on a mobile phone, in a loud room on a break from her job as a bartender.” These kinds of scenarios keep you focused on actual user needs rather than abstract problems.

• For a thorough review, cover your bases systematically. Identify your top audiences, their main goals, and the devices they use. For a large site, you might create 15-20 scenarios that collectively represent three key audiences, four major site goals, and three device types. You don’t need every possible combination—just aim for each audience, goal, and device to appear in roughly three scenarios.

• For a quicker review, create at least a few scenarios. You can get benefit out of heuristics without a big project. If you’re not ready for a comprehensive evaluation just yet, create at least 3 or so scenarios like the one above that cover some typical goals and a single audience. Walk through the most important user journeys on your site before diving into edge cases. If someone can’t figure out how to get help or make a donation, that’s more urgent than a typo on your board bios page.

• Use the right heuristics for your site type. A donation-focused advocacy site needs different guidelines than a resource-heavy legal aid site. Generic web usability heuristics might miss issues specific to your sector or site type.

• Expect to find a lot. Don’t panic when you discover dozens of potential issues—that’s normal and actually useful. The key is prioritizing ruthlessly so you don’t get overwhelmed. (This is a perfect opportunity to put the Guide to Managing Your Website Project Tasks into use.)

The goal here isn’t perfection—it’s identifying the issues that actually matter to your users and addressing them strategically. Think of it as preventive care for your website.

Where do you find sets of heuristics? Glad you asked! Karen Heredia and I have developed some that apply to specific website types:

• Content-rich website heuristics (free subscription required) – For content-heavy sites that need guidelines focusing on plain language, clear paths, and making lots of information easier to digest.

• Legal aid website heuristics – For organizations serving people who need immediate, actionable help.

• SMS messaging guidelines – Are you sending out sequential SMS messages? These are written for legal aid context but relevant for any organization using sequential text messaging.

Keen to hear how you use these!