Frequently asked questions

A heuristic evaluation is a structured usability inspection method in which one or more evaluators review an interface against a set of established usability principles (“heuristics”) and record where the design violates them. It was popularized by Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich in 1990 and remains one of the fastest, cheapest ways to find usability problems — no participant recruiting required.

Heuristic Studio ships with six proven frameworks:

• Nielsen's 10 Heuristics (10 principles)
• Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules (8 principles)
• Weinschenk & Barker Classification (8 principles)
• Gerhardt-Powals' Cognitive Engineering Principles (10 principles)
• Bruce Tognazzini's First Principles (10 principles)
• Bastien & Scapin's Heuristics (15 principles)

Each framework includes the full principle definitions, so you can evaluate without keeping a reference book open.

When you upload a screenshot, you can optionally ask the AI to analyze it. The AI reviews the screenshot against the principles of your chosen framework and suggests potential findings — the principle violated, a description of the issue, and a proposed severity. Every suggestion is just a starting point: you review, edit, accept, or discard each one. AI analysis only runs when you explicitly request it.

Yes. The built-in annotator lets you draw directly on uploaded screenshots with shapes (rectangles and ellipses), arrows, text labels, and a freehand pen. Annotations make it easy to pinpoint exactly where in the interface a usability issue occurs, and they appear alongside the finding in your report.

Every finding gets a severity rating — low, medium, high, or critical — plus a finding type, so your team can sort and prioritize what to fix first. Severity typically reflects how frequently the problem occurs, how much it impacts users, and whether users can work around it.

Yes. Once your evaluation is complete, you can generate a clean, professional report and print it or save it as a PDF straight from your browser — ready to share with stakeholders, clients, or your development team.

Yes. Your projects, evaluations, and screenshots are private to your account. Data is stored in Supabase with row-level security policies, which means the database itself enforces that each user can only read and write their own data. We never sell your data. See our Privacy Policy for details.

Yes — sign-in keeps your evaluations tied to you and private. You sign in with your Google account in a couple of clicks; there is no separate password to manage.

Heuristic Studio is free while we are in beta. Down the road we plan a free tier alongside a paid Pro plan for teams that need unlimited projects, all frameworks, and unlimited AI credits — but you can run real evaluations today at no cost.

Research by Nielsen suggests that a single evaluator finds roughly a third of usability problems, while three to five evaluators together typically uncover the majority. If you can, have a few teammates evaluate independently and then consolidate the findings — you will get much better coverage than any one person alone.

Yes. Because evaluations are based on screenshots you upload, you can assess anything you can capture an image of — websites, mobile apps, desktop software, kiosks, even paper prototypes.

A focused evaluation of a single flow usually takes one to two hours per evaluator. Heuristic Studio speeds this up by keeping the framework principles, screenshot annotation, and finding capture in one place, and by letting AI propose a first pass of findings for you to verify.