10 Usability Heuristics by Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen defined 10 usability heuristics for User Interface design back in 1994. Those principles are quite old, sure, but they are so tied to the human nature and intuition that they are still taught nowadays and widely applied in software design.

Although human-computer interaction and, more specifically, Graphic User Interfaces (GUI) are the main subjects that come to our mind when we hear about User Interface Design, an interface is actually a much more general subject, so that those 10 principles can be extended to many different domains as exemplified in this video below:

The video itself doesn’t have a very pleasant design, IMHO =) But the examples are very valuable! The process of creating a new design is iterative. The interface is composed step-by-step, button-by-button, and the designer is very prone to end up adding more features than the average user is expecting, creating a polluted application.

A common mistake is to think that accessibility is improved when the main page contains links to every other page in a website. It’s indeed very natural for the developer to reach any page with a single click. He knows where the information is. He structured that information himself according to his own criteria. A site map page provided by many existing websites contains links to any other page. But how many users do really use site map to navigate?

The result of iteration is that many of those principles get lost along the development. Therefore, keeping a checklist can be always helpful. Simplicity matters.