10a Heuristic Evaluation

App Prototyping Studio

Mick McQuaid
mcq@utexas.edu

University of Texas at Austin

14 Sep 2026

Week TEN

Heuristic Evaluation

User research as described and as practiced

Promotional picture of Jakob Nielsen

Nielsen’s Heuristics

  1. Visibility of system status
  2. Match between system and the real world
  3. User control and freedom
  4. Consistency and standards
  5. Error prevention
  6. Recognition rather than recall
  7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
  8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
  9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
  10. Help and documentation

Nielsen developed two sets of these heuristics, Nielsen and Molich (1990) and Nielsen (1994). This is the second and enduring one, still popular after thirty years.

END

References

Nielsen, Jakob. 1994. “Enhancing the Explanatory Power of Usability Heuristics.” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’94) (New York, NY, USA), 152–58.
Nielsen, Jakob, and Rolf Molich. 1990. “Improving a Human-Computer Dialogue.” Communications of the ACM (New York, NY, USA) 33 (3): 338–48.

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