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Issues are the core of every report. Each issue is a specific, actionable usability problem a persona found, with enough context for you to decide what to do about it.

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The issue card

Every issue has the same structure: Severity. One of:
  • Critical — the persona couldn’t complete the scenario, or the issue causes data loss, trust damage, or abandonment.
  • High — significant friction. The persona could finish, but with visible effort or frustration.
  • Medium — real usability problem, but not blocking. Worth fixing.
  • Low — polish. Wouldn’t stop the persona, but detracts from the experience.
Heuristic. The Nielsen heuristic the issue violates. One of the 10 heuristics:
  • Visibility of system status
  • Match between system and real world
  • User control and freedom
  • Consistency and standards
  • Error prevention
  • Recognition rather than recall
  • Flexibility and efficiency of use
  • Aesthetic and minimalist design
  • Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
  • Help and documentation
What’s happening. The observed behavior. What the persona saw and what they did. Concrete, not abstract. Why it matters. The user impact. Why this specific behavior is a problem for this persona. Who it affects most. Sometimes the issue hits some users harder than others — a confusing label may be fine for a power user but crippling for a first-timer. This section names the audience most at risk. Recommendation. A concrete suggestion for how to fix it. Not always the right fix for your product — but a starting point that makes the conversation easier.

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How to use severity

Severity is Percio’s best judgment. It’s calibrated for the persona running the test — a critical issue for a first-timer might be a medium for a power user. Use it as a starting point, not a tribunal. A good first pass on a report:
  1. Read every critical and high issue. Decide which are confirmed, false positives, or dismissed.
  2. Look for patterns across the medium issues — several mediums pointing at the same area often signal a larger problem.
  3. Skim the lows. They’re usually polish work that can wait.

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How to use the heuristic tag

The heuristic tells you why the issue is a problem — which is what you need if you’re explaining the issue to a teammate who wasn’t in the room. Seeing the same heuristic flagged repeatedly across different parts of your product is a strong signal. Recurring Consistency and standards violations suggest a design system gap. Recurring Error prevention violations suggest your forms and state transitions need attention. Recurring Match between system and real world violations suggest your copy is speaking a different language from your users.

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Comparing reports across personas

To get another angle on the same flow, run a second test with a different persona. A first-timer and a power user rarely raise the same issues — the contrast is where a lot of the signal lives. Comparison is done by reading both reports side by side in your test history; Percio doesn’t fold multiple persona reports into a single view.

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What’s next