Usability Heuristics

Usability Heuristics

Mike Hall | 13/01/2011

Usability heuristics are ‘rules of thumb’ which are used to guide design decisions when designing a new site or application. We also use these ‘rules of thumb’ when evaluating existing sites, to allow us to compare sites ‘like’ for ‘like’. By comparing sites to a list of pre-determined heuristics, we replace personal opinion and personal likes or dislikes in favour of more concrete best practice usability rules.

Jakob Nielsen describes 10 general overriding usability principles for designing user interfaces in his article ‘Ten Usability Heuristics’ at useit.com.

At Wiliam we have used these overriding principles, as well as over 12 years of experience of designing sites which work (and having identified design decision which didn’t work so well) to come up with a list of 50 general usability heuristics used for all new site designs and any site evaluations undertaken.

The heuristics cover all aspects of usability design and are too lengthy to describe in full in this article, but cover issues such as ensuring that there is a clear visual hierarchy to all elements on a page and that sufficient white space is used, whilst keeping unnecessary visual noise to a minimum.

tags: Web Design ,  Web Strategy