Usability evaluation is the part of the design process where you stop guessing and start checking. Instead of assuming an interface works, you apply structured methods — expert inspections, heuristic reviews, and tests with real users — to find out where people hesitate, make errors, or give up. The goal is not to prove a design is good, but to surface problems early enough and cheaply enough that you can fix them.
In this course, this topic ties together everything that comes before it. You have studied memory limits, mental models, and task structure; evaluation is how you verify that your design actually respects those constraints. You will also see two broad families of methods: expert-driven inspection (such as heuristic evaluation), which is fast and cheap but filtered through a reviewer's judgment, and user testing, which is slower but reveals behavior you could not have predicted. Knowing when to use each is a core professional skill.
As you watch, pay attention to three things: how usability is defined and broken into measurable components, how evaluators move from scattered observations to a consolidated, documented list of issues, and how qualitative findings get paired with quantitative metrics. Also notice that evaluation is described as something you repeat — each round feeds a design revision, which then gets tested again.
A short foundational explainer from Nielsen Norman Group that defines usability and breaks it into five quality components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction. It frames usability as a property of the interface that can be assessed rather than a vague judgment of quality, and likely distinguishes usability from related ideas such as utility and overall user experience.
This is the natural starting point for the topic, giving you the vocabulary and the component framework that every later evaluation method measures against; NN/g is the field's most widely cited practitioner source.
A step-by-step walkthrough of how to run a heuristic evaluation, the best-known structured expert inspection method. Based on its chapter markers, it covers having evaluators review the interface independently, works through an example of applying heuristics to a real interface, and then shows how multiple evaluators' findings are consolidated into a single issue list before summarizing the process.
It directly addresses the structured evaluation and issue-documentation subtopics, and the consolidation step shows concretely how expert-driven methods differ in workflow and output from user testing.
An introduction to the System Usability Scale, a standardized ten-question survey given to participants at the end of a user test. The video explains what the instrument measures — perceived usability — and, based on its framing, how to administer it and interpret the resulting score in context rather than as an absolute verdict.
It covers the metrics and measures subtopic with a specific, widely used instrument, and demonstrates how a quantitative score can complement the qualitative issues you observe during user testing.
These three videos support MO4 most directly: together they let you compare a structured, expert-driven method (heuristic evaluation) with user-testing approaches and their associated measures (SUS), so you can reason about which fits a given design context, budget, and stage of development. The usability components video supplies the criteria — learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, satisfaction — that connect evaluation back to the cognitive constraints and mental-model mismatches studied earlier in the module (MO1, MO2), since errors and learnability problems are often symptoms of those mismatches. The consolidation and scoring practices shown here also feed forward into prototyping work (MO5), where findings from one round of evaluation become the justification for the next revision of your low- to mid-fidelity prototype.
These videos were chosen from YouTube on October 3, 2026. Each has captions; the player turns them on. Videos on YouTube can be changed or removed — if one no longer plays, tell your instructor. If a player does not appear, use its Watch on YouTube link.