The Relevance of Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design to User Experience Across Device Platform

What is Usability Heuristics?

A process where experts use rule of thumb to measure the usability of user interfaces in independent walkthroughs and alsreport issues is called USABILITY HEURISTICS EVALUATION

The Nielsen-Molich Heuristics states that a system should:

1. Visibility of system status: allow users to understand and know their progress or status.
2. Match between system and real world: making sure to show informations in ways users understand from the way real world operates.
3. User control and freedom: offer user control and let users undo errors easily.
4. Consistency and standards: making sure both graphics elements and terminologies are maintained across similar platforms.
5. Error prevention: making sure to avoid errors or notifying users before they take risky actions.
6. Recognition rather than recall: have visible informations or instructions for users instead of letting them rely on memory.
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use: making sure experienced users find faster ways to achieve goals.
8. Aesthetics and minimalism design: making sure it contains only relevant informations to avoid cluster.
9. Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors: making use of plain help words to pass informations about errors and the solutions.
10. Help and documentation: lists steps and provide searchable documentation for overcoming problems.

How To Conduct A Heuristics Evaluation

1. Know what to test and how, clearly define the parameters of what to test and the objectives.
2. Know your users and have clear definitions of the target audience’s goals.
3. Select 3–5 evaluators, ensuring their expertise in usability and the relevant industry.
4. Define the heuristics. This would depend on the nature of the product or design, you could consider Nielsen-Molich Heuristics.
5. Brief evaluators on what to cover in a selection of task, suggesting a scale of security codes to flag issues.
6. First walkthrough, have evaluators use the product freely so they can identify elements to analyze.
7. Second walkthrough,evaluators scrutinize individual elements according to the heuristics. They examine how the elements fits into the design and record all issues encountered.
8. Debrief evaluators in a session so they can collate results for analysis and suggest fixes.

An important part is that heuristics evaluation however helpful, is no substitute for Usability Testing.