Heuristic evaluation

Honda of Clear Lake

A usability audit of a real car dealership's website, evaluated against Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics to find where real car shoppers were losing confidence.

Role: Solo UX Auditor
Team: Solo project
Scope: Practice audit
Tools: Figma, FigJam

01 — The problem

Shoppers couldn't shop with confidence

Buying a car is already a high-stakes decision. Walking through the live site as a first-time shopper, the friction wasn't a single broken feature — it was a pattern of small heuristic violations (inconsistent navigation, unclear pricing, weak error recovery) that each chipped away at trust before a shopper ever reached financing.

02 — Research → decision → evaluation

From violation to recommendation

We learned Running the site against Nielsen's 10 heuristics surfaced repeated violations of visibility of system status and consistency/standards — shoppers couldn't always tell what filters were active or what a click would do before doing it.

So I changed I wrote prioritized, severity-ranked recommendations (not a redesign) tied to each violation — specific fixes like persistent filter state, clearer inventory and pricing labeling, and consistent navigation patterns across pages.

Evaluated via A severity-rating pass against Nielsen's own 0–4 scale, so the recommendations read as a prioritized punch list a real team could act on, not a flat list of opinions.

03 — Outcome

A prioritized fix list, not just a critique

The deliverable was a heuristic evaluation report: every violation tied to a specific heuristic, rated by severity, and paired with a concrete recommendation — the format a real stakeholder could hand to engineering without translation.

heuristics evaluated

0–4

severity scale applied per finding