Accessibility, Heuristics & Expert Evaluation

Accessibility, Heuristics & Expert Evaluation

Before you can run a full user study, you can already catch a large share of usability and accessibility problems yourself, through an expert review. Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics and a cognitive walkthrough give you a practical way to spot friction in a login flow, a dashboard, or a checkout. WCAG basics (contrast, alt text, keyboard navigation, focus order, labels) and the Dutch Wet digitale toegankelijkheid set the bar for accessibility, and Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) tell you how fast and stable an interface actually feels to a user.

Starting Points

• Nielsen, J. (2020). 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. Nielsen Norman Group.
• World Wide Web Consortium (2018). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). W3C.
• Google. Web Vitals. web.dev.
• Firth, A. (2024). Practical Web Accessibility: A Comprehensive Guide to Digital Inclusion (2nd ed.)

Key Points

• You analyse a web application (e.g. login flow, dashboard, checkout) for usability, accessibility, and performance issues.
• You apply Nielsen's heuristics and a cognitive walkthrough to detect usability problems.
• You check an interface against WCAG principles to identify common accessibility problems.
• You explain Core Web Vitals (LCP, CLS, INP) and what they mean for user experience.
• You give clear, practical advice to improve usability, accessibility, and performance.