UX Glossary · N
Nielsen's heuristics
Also: 10 usability heuristics
Ten general usability principles used as the standard checklist for expert interface review.
Jakob Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics are the most widely used framework for expert review. They came out of work with Rolf Molich in 1990 and were refined by Nielsen in 1994, derived from factor analysis of several hundred real usability problems.
- Visibility of system status. Keep the user informed about what is going on.
- Match between system and the real world. Speak the user’s language.
- User control and freedom. Provide a clearly marked way out, including undo.
- Consistency and standards. Same word, same thing, and follow platform conventions.
- Error prevention. Better than any error message.
- Recognition rather than recall. Keep options visible instead of requiring memory.
- Flexibility and efficiency of use. Accelerators for experienced users.
- Aesthetic and minimalist design. Every extra element competes with the relevant ones.
- Help users recognise, diagnose and recover from errors. In plain language, with a way forward.
- Help and documentation. Findable, task-focused, concrete.
How to use them
They are a lens for heuristic evaluation, not a scorecard. The value is in forcing a reviewer to look at an interface from ten different angles rather than the one their eye naturally takes.
Their limits
They are general by design, so they say nothing about domain-specific requirements, and they identify violations rather than surprises. Only real users reveal that a label meant something entirely different to them.
In practice
Numbers 1 and 9, system status and error recovery, account for a large share of findings in most reviews, and both are cheap to fix.