Heuristic Evaluation Articles & Videos

  • The Custodial Era of UX: Cleaning Up After AI

    AI lets teams build faster than UX can evaluate. UX can adapt by building shared judgment, accelerating evaluation, and guiding AI-generated designs.

  • Design Guidance: Principles, Patterns, Heuristics, and Team Charters

    Design teams rely on a combination of principles, patterns, heuristics, and charters to create consistent and usable experiences in a collaborative way.

  • Usability Heuristics Applied to Board Games

    Usability heuristics suggest what influences the design of successful board games.

  • Memory Recognition and Recall in User Interfaces

    Recalling items from scratch is harder than recognizing the correct option in a list of choices because the extra context helps users retrieve information from memory.

  • How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation

    Step-by-step instructions to review your product to find potential usability and experience problems. Download a free heuristic evaluation template.

  • An Error Messages Scoring Rubric

    Identify UX problems with error messages consistently and effectively using a scoring rubric based on established usability best practices for error messages.

  • Error-Message Guidelines

    Design effective error messages by ensuring they are highly visible, provide constructive communication, and respect user effort.

  • How to Conduct a Cognitive Walkthrough Workshop

    Step-by-step directions for running a cognitive-walkthrough workshop with examples and templates included.

  • Support Recall Instead of Recognition in UI Design

    To strengthen people’s memory skills, we should design interfaces that help users practice recall.

  • Evaluate Interface Learnability with Cognitive Walkthroughs

    Learnability is a crucial component of UX for complex and novel interfaces. Cognitive walkthroughs can identify design problems that derail new users.

  • 10 Usability Heuristics Applied to Complex Applications

    Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics can be used to analyze the UX of applications that support domain-specific, complex workflows.

  • 10 Usability Heuristics Applied to Virtual Reality

    Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics can improve the user experience of VR applications.

  • Maintain Consistency and Adhere to Standards (Usability Heuristic #4)

    Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. Follow platform and industry conventions.

  • Help and Documentation (Usability Heuristic #10)

    Interface help comes in two forms: proactive and reactive. Proactive help is intended to get users familiar with an interface while reactive help is meant for troubleshooting and gaining system proficiency.

  • User Control and Freedom (Usability Heuristic #3)

    Users often make mistakes or change their minds. Allow them to exit a flow or undo their last action and go back to the system’s previous state.

  • Flexibility and Efficiency of Use (Usability Heuristic #7)

    Shortcuts— unseen by the novice user — speed up the interaction for the expert users such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users.

  • 10 Usability Heuristics Applied to Video Games

    Following Jakob Nielsen’s 10 heuristics for user-interface design will improve the user experience of video games.

  • Match Between the System and the Real World (Usability Heuristic #2)

    Systems should speak users' language, follow real-world conventions, and make information appear in a natural and logical order.

  • Visibility of System Status (Usability Heuristic #1)

    Communicating the current state allows users to feel in control of the system, take appropriate actions to reach their goal, and ultimately trust the brand.

  • UX Expert Reviews

    Expert reviews involve the analysis of a design by a UX expert with the goal of identifying usability problems and strengths.