You can conduct heuristic evaluation at any point in the design/implementation process. It is best to conduct heuristic evaluation on your own, by multiple individuals. This helps avoid some of the bias that might come through in a group setting.

The heuristics I follow are outlined by Jakob Nielsen: here

These heuristics have gone through some revisions as well, which is why we use H2 to represent:

• H2-1 – Visibility of system status
• H2-2 – Match between system and real world
• H2-3 – User control and freedom
• H2-4 – Consistency and Standards
• H2-5 – Error Prevention
• H2-6 – Recognition rather than recall
• H2-7 – Flexibility and efficiency of use
• H2-8 – Aesthetic and minimalist design
• H2-9 – Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
• H2-10 – Help and documentation

The benefit of this system is you can evaluate work that is already implemented, and hopefully catch usability issues that might plague your system.

You should also indicate the severity of each issue on a scale of 0 to 4:

• 0 – don’t agree this is a usability problem
• 1 – cosmetic problem
• 2 – minor usability problem
• 3 – major usability problem
• 4 – usability catastrophe, imperative to fix

Finally, you should meet with a member of the development team to determine the fix difficulty on a similar scale (0 - trivial, 4 - extremely difficult).

Your report then should include the heuristic violation (HE), the severity (SEV), and the description. Something similar to this example:

Page/Frame	HE	SEV	Fix	Description
index.html	H2-10	3	0	No link to help from here