Heuristic evaluation is still your fastest fix

With AI tooling dominating design chatter, it's easy to forget the cheapest, fastest usability method still works: heuristic evaluation. It costs nothing but time and catches problems before you ever test with real users.

Heuristic evaluation — walking through an interface against a known set of usability principles — is decades old, but it's still one of the most reliable, lowest-cost methods a junior designer has. No recruiting, no scheduling, no tools beyond a checklist and 10–15 minutes per screen. It's not a replacement for real user testing, and it won't catch everything — it's a filter, not a verdict. But it's a genuinely useful habit to build early, and it doubles as a great way to self-critique your own portfolio work before you ask anyone else to look at it.

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