10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
What is it
The 10 Usability Heuristics are general “rules of thumb” or guiding principles for user interface based on research done by Jakob Nielsen.
Who does it
Depending on your team, heuristic evaluations can be a designer or a researcher’s job. Either way, it’s important to know these principles and have them inform the design decisions made.
When to use it
- Start with a heuristic evaluation and then alternate with user testing (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-problems-found-by-heuristic-evaluation/)
- Typically, one would first perform a heuristic evaluation to clean up the interface and remove as many "obvious" usability problems as possible. After a redesign of the interface addressing the violations, user test to find remaining usability problems that were not picked up by the heuristic evaluation.