The Relevance of Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design to User Experience Across Device Platform
What is Usability Heuristics?
2 min readMar 14, 2021
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:
- Visibility of system status: allow users to understand and know their progress or status.
- Match between system and real world: making sure to show informations in ways users understand from the way real world operates.
- User control and freedom: offer user control and let users undo errors easily.
- Consistency and standards: making sure both graphics elements and terminologies are maintained across similar platforms.
- Error prevention: making sure to avoid errors or notifying users before they take risky actions.
- Recognition rather than recall: have visible informations or instructions for users instead of letting them rely on memory.
- Flexibility and efficiency of use: making sure experienced users find faster ways to achieve goals.
- Aesthetics and minimalism design: making sure it contains only relevant informations to avoid cluster.
- Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors: making use of plain help words to pass informations about errors and the solutions.
- Help and documentation: lists steps and provide searchable documentation for overcoming problems.
How To Conduct A Heuristics Evaluation
- Know what to test and how, clearly define the parameters of what to test and the objectives.
- Know your users and have clear definitions of the target audience’s goals.
- Select 3–5 evaluators, ensuring their expertise in usability and the relevant industry.
- Define the heuristics. This would depend on the nature of the product or design, you could consider Nielsen-Molich Heuristics.
- Brief evaluators on what to cover in a selection of task, suggesting a scale of security codes to flag issues.
- First walkthrough, have evaluators use the product freely so they can identify elements to analyze.
- Second walkthrough,evaluators scrutinize individual elements according to the heuristics. They examine how the elements fits into the design and record all issues encountered.
- 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.