The Relevance of Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design to User Experience across device platforms.
By Adeyeye Adedamola
What is Heuristics Evaluation? Heuristic evaluation is a process where experts use rules of thumb to measure the usability of user interfaces in independent walkthroughs and report issues.
10 Usability Heuristic for User Interface Design.
- Visibility of system Status: Keep users informed about its status appropriately and promptly using feedback.
- Match between system and Real world: Show information in users language, ways users understand from how the real world operates by making the information appear natural and logical.
- User control and Freedom: Users are meant to make mistake while performing actions, They need to be shown and offer users control and let them undo errors easily.
- Consistency and Standards: Using a consistent platform and industry conventions so users are not confused over what different words or icons means.
- Error Prevention: A system should have a good error message and either avoid conditions where errors arise or warn users before they take risky actions.
- Recognition rather than recall: Reduce the information that users have to remember by being consistent with your designs.
- Flexibility and efficiency of use: Creating a form of shortcut for users by allowing users to tailor frequent actions.
- Aesthetic and minimalist design: Keep the content and visual design of UI focus on the essentials by making use of the relevant informations.
- Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error message should e expressed in plain language.
- Help and Documentation: List concise steps to be carried out, provide necessary documentation to help users understand how to complete their tasks.
How to Conduct Heuristic Evaluation
- Know what you will test and how
- Understand your users
- Conduct the heuristic walk-through
- Collect results
- Analyse the results
- Brief the evaluators.