Usability testing is usually expensive and time consuming. A heuristic review can help lighten the burden. Lisa Herrod discusses usability heuristic and expert reviews:
In conducting an heuristic review, a series of guidelines or checkpoints is used by the usability expert to assess a site (or application). In conducting an expert review however, these specific guidelines may not be utilised, with the practitioner relying on their expertise of general usability principles to review the site at hand.
Usability is a cross-cutting concern, in other words, every single aspect of a web site contributes to it. I agree with Lisa when she says that it is necessary that different roles, like Information Architect, JavaScripter or Web Standards Developer have their own heuristics which can be used as guidelines. In fact I would consider that every project can have its own roles to verify whether the web site is usable or not. These guidelines can never be complete, however the biggest advantage I see is that the critical ones are always checked in the beginning. For example, while using JavaScript, testing whether the website works with JavaScript disabled is a critical test. In fact, a proactive use of the guidelines is to use them in the development and unit testing. This can help us identify what does not comply with the usability heuristics much earlier in the cycle, and in turn save us time and effort for usability testing in future.
