As a UX practitioner, you must conduct research with real people and users of your products. However, when you first approach any research problem it should be examined and analyzed using your expertise.
This will provide you with a solid foundation for the rest of the research and design. All through a project, you should continue to review the work in this way.
In this section, we will examine two methods that rely on UX practitioners' expertise--heuristic analyses and content audits.
Heuristic analysis is an expert UX research method, where the practitioner evaluates an interface using selected heuristics. Heuristics are practical guidelines for doing work, based on established principles. Heuristic analysis should never replace testing an interface with users; it has been shown that one expert will only find about a third of the usability problems that will occur in a usability test. However, it is very useful to enhance your research. The heuristics...