(Subscriber only) For many websites packed with important content, usability isn’t just about whether a form works—it’s about whether people can actually find and understand the information they need. That’s especially true when it comes to usability for content-rich nonprofit websites, where the stakes are high. Visitors often rely on these sites to access critical data, find support during stressful times, or connect with essential services. If your site is hard to read or navigate, people might not just get frustrated—they might lose access to the help they need.
Evaluating text-heavy websites requires a different approach than testing interactive tools or feature-rich apps. That’s where a "heuristic evaluation" can help. It gives experienced reviewers a structured way to assess how well a site supports typical users in lifelike situations, using practical usability principles. Jakob Nielsen's classic usability heuristics are well known and work very well for software and form-heavy sites, but content-rich nonprofit websites need a modified set of guidelines—ones that emphasize plain language, clear paths, and helping users absorb large amounts of information with less effort.
Drawing from our work on text-heavy websites—especially in the legal aid world—we’ve created a this set of evaluation criteria. The complete framework below contains seven categories with over 60 individual heuristics. In this article, we’ll start with an overview of how to use these heuristics to improve your own site, and then walk through the categories one by one.
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