Design·4 min read
Thirty years old, and still the fastest review you can run
Nielsen refined these from a factor analysis of 249 real usability problems. They still catch most of what goes wrong before anyone books a research session.
Source
10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design
Jakob Nielsen · Nielsen Norman Group · 1994, updated 2020
Read the originalAslanWay is not the author of this work. The summary below describes the source; the commentary that follows is ours and is not endorsed by the author.
What it argues
Jakob Nielsen developed the heuristics with Rolf Molich in 1990 and refined them in 1994 based on a factor analysis of 249 usability problems. Nielsen Norman Group updated the explanations in 2020; the ten heuristics themselves have not needed to change.
They are deliberately broad rules of thumb rather than specific guidelines — visibility of system status, match between the system and the real world, user control and freedom, consistency and standards, error prevention, recognition rather than recall, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and minimalist design, help users recognise and recover from errors, and help and documentation.
Their value is economic. A heuristic evaluation costs a few hours of a few people's time and surfaces a large share of the problems that would otherwise be found in moderated testing, which costs considerably more.
What we do with it
- Heuristic evaluation finds problems; it does not tell you what real users are trying to do. Use it to clear the obvious defects so that expensive research time is spent on questions only users can answer.
- In regulated and enterprise interfaces, "help users recognise and recover from errors" is usually where the money is. Most of the cost sits in the exception paths, not the happy path.
- Pair this with the WebAIM Million, which found 95.9% of the top million home pages have detectable WCAG failures. Heuristics and accessibility conformance are separate checks, and passing one says nothing about the other.