10 Usability Heuristics with Examples
by SaiChandan Duggirala
User Experience is a qualitative metric subject to many factors. It’s an evolving discipline and it’s evident when the forerunner of great user experiences, Apple, humbly tags their iOS Human Interface Guidelines as Beta. Google termed their material design guidelines as a living document which will be updated regularly. One of the pioneers who tried to objectively evaluate the user experience on digital platforms is Jakob Nielsen with his heuristic evaluation. Though they date back to the 90’s, these general rules of thumb are still valid and are used today.
In this article, I attempt to explain these 10 rules in common language with examples:
1. Visibility of System Status
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| Imaginary design by Icons8 to improve the User Experience of a Boarding pass. |
In this article, I attempt to explain these 10 rules in common language with examples:
1. Visibility of System Status
2. Match between system and the real world
3. User Control and Freedom
4. Consistency and Standards
5. Error Prevention
6. Recognition rather than recall
7. Flexibility and Efficiency of use
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. Help and Documentation
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| GoDaddy’s Help page |
Conclusion:
These guidelines are general rules of thumb and will mostly be applicable to any web & mobile application with some exceptions. Always use your judgment to implement these principles or any other UX practices by keeping yourself in end user’s shoes.
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Heuristic Evaluations and Expert Reviews
Advantages and Disadvantages of Heuristics
A heuristic evaluation should not replace usability testing. Although the heuristics relate to criteria that affect your site’s usability, the issues identified in a heuristic evaluation are different than those found in a usability test.
Advantages
- It can provide some quick and relatively inexpensive feedback to designers.
- You can obtain feedback early in the design process.
- Assigning the correct heuristic can help suggest the best corrective measures to designers.
- You can use it together with other usability testing methodologies.
- You can conduct usability testing to further examine potential issues.
Disadvantages
- It requires knowledge and experience to apply the heuristics effectively.
- Trained usability experts are sometimes hard to find and can be expensive.
- You should use multiple experts and aggregate their results.
- The evaluation may identify more minor issues and fewer major issues.
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Though many groups have developed heuristics, one of the best-known sources is the set developed by Nielsen’s in 1994. Nielsen refined the list originally developed in 1990 by himself and Rolf Molich. Nielsen’s Heuristics include:
- Visibility of system status: The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time.
- Match between system and the real world: The system should speak the users' language, with words, phrases and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
- User control and freedom: Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked "emergency exit" to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. Support undo and redo.
- Consistency and standards: Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform conventions.
- Error prevention: Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
- Recognition rather than recall: Minimize the user's memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
- Flexibility and efficiency of use: Accelerators—unseen by the novice user—may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
- Aesthetic and minimalist design: Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility.
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
- Help and documentation: Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user's task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.
Expert Reviews
In an expert review, the reviewers already know and understand the heuristics. Because of this, reviewers do not use a specific set of heuristics. As a result, the expert review tends to be less formal, and they are not required to assign a specific heuristic to each potential problem.
