The Relevance of Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design to User Experience across device platforms.

By Adeyeye Adedamola

The Relevance of Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design to User Experience across device platforms.

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.

  1. Visibility of system Status: Keep users informed about its status appropriately and promptly using feedback.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Consistency and Standards: Using a consistent platform and industry conventions so users are not confused over what different words or icons means.
  5. 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.
  6. Recognition rather than recall: Reduce the information that users have to remember by being consistent with your designs.
  7. Flexibility and efficiency of use: Creating a form of shortcut for users by allowing users to tailor frequent actions.
  8. Aesthetic and minimalist design: Keep the content and visual design of UI focus on the essentials by making use of the relevant informations.
  9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error message should e expressed in plain language.
  10. 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

  1. Know what you will test and how
  2. Understand your users
  3. Conduct the heuristic walk-through
  4. Collect results
  5. Analyse the results
  6. Brief the evaluators.