Understanding Usability Heuristics: Introduction
The concept of usability may come across as subjective or vague, making you wonder if it’s possible to know if your products are usable. However, usability remains essential to the user experience (UX). It matters whether you’re designing a newsletter subscription form or a checkout screen. Welcome to this overview of heuristics to give you a decent idea of how usable your products are.
What are Usability Heuristics?
Heuristics are measures to help you assess product usability. They are useful guides that when combined with usability testing, make your designs come alive to users. In other words, they make your products more usable to more people.
Jakob Nielsen’s Fundamental Usability Heuristics: The First 5
These five heuristics are the first of 10 that can support you in delivering usability enhancement in your product.
Visibility of system status
This heuristic focuses on communication. Your products can be transparent, communicating what they’re doing and the status of each user request or action. Being aware of the system status is especially important when the user has input information or acted and expecting a significant response. This can be sending an email, successful file download, or transfer of money.
Match between system and the real world
Your design should always speak the user’s language. Familiar concepts, phrases, or words are preferable to internal jargon. Similarly, real-world conventions and style make information appear natural and logical.
A perfect example here is the use of the word “library” in e-reader apps and devices. They use language and imagery that are consistent with users’ familiar mental model.
User control and freedom
One critical element of good usability is to provide the ability to undo actions or edit information. Word processor software, like the one I’m typing this article in, have offered this ability for years. There’s Google Drive too! It informs you when an action has been completed and goes one step further to suggest the undo option. Nifty product design!
Consistency and standards
Users should care less about whether words, situations, or actions have the same meaning. It’s best to follow platform and industry conventions so that the user’s expectations, based on prior experience with other digital products, doesn’t increase their cognitive load by making them learn something new.
Error prevention
Imagine a poorly designed form that provides an error message for an incorrect address or phone number! This heuristic focuses on addressing errors before they occur. Though it’s nice to have good error messages, it’s possible to eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and offer users a confirmation option before they complete the action. Password fields in forms use this to confirm that a user has used the right password specification.
We’ve just looked at the first five usability heuristics. Gain access to UILand’s premium screen and user flow library to enable you see these heuristics in action. Find the next five here.
