Only designing interfaces is not the end, as a designer, you must have a solid understanding of how to measure it for your own designs. How do you determine whether your goods are genuinely usable? Once the designs are ready, to run a usability test heuristics principles come into the picture, using which we carry out the heuristic evaluation. Though usability is a vast field and includes a lot more than just heuristic evaluation, it is an essential practice.
In this article, we would be looking into some very important heuristics to evaluate whether the design you have created is usable or not.
What is Heuristic Evaluation?
Heuristic evaluation is a method of discovery and determination using defined guidelines and principles, that is used to check whether a design is fulfilling usability aspects. It is a usability practice where the usability of user interfaces is assessed during independent walkthroughs and indicates problems. This provides insights that might aid design teams in improving the usability of products from the very beginning. It ensures that designs are not only pleasing but are equally usable and have a good experience.
11 Heuristic Principles For Interactive Designs
1. Visibility of System Status
This heuristic principle is all about communicating ideas clearly through design. It talks about how to make your products transparent and communicative about their actions and the progress of consumers’ requests and actions. There should be a clear sense of control that can be evoked by providing information about the system status and feedback after every interaction a user makes on the app. Make sure your user understands the system status. This is particularly important when the user has just made a submission or taken an action that they anticipate will have an important outcome, such as sending money, moving a product to a wishlist or cart, and most important while discarding or deleting important information.
Clear feedback and system status make the app experience rich for users, they know where they are, what needs to be done, and what has been done already.
2. Match between The System and The Real World
This heuristic says that, explains and expresses how the real world operates, in the users’ language. Revolving around basic user experience fundamentals of the “User’s Mental Model” are tested through this heuristic principle. A basic example to explain is the effective use of icons, such as Recycle bin(trash icon) denoting that all the trash, deleted, and discarded files are under that particular folder. This is very evident for users to understand because they can relate this icon and folder to a real-life bin that holds only trash and discarded items.
Another simple example could be Iphone’s calculator which is based on skeuomorphism, which is basically replicating real-life objects into reel life.
Always look to bits and pieces when you’re designing for a product that already exists in the user’s mental model, then try to replicate the real-life functionality into reel life. This would help users better understand and implement the required task. Avoid re-creating an existing mental model.
3. Error Handling and Prevention
One of the most crucial heuristic principles that evaluate whether a system is effectively handling and preventing errors. This generally comes into play when a user fills a form, UPI payment during the checkout, etc, wherever a need to input and verify the details is required. Error handling should be done in a way that no unverified data should be processed. Whereas Error prevention would be a good approach to make a system intelligent, which gives visual cues whenever any irrelevant input is made.
By directing users to only travel via the safe regions, it is possible to reduce the likelihood that a slip will occur which is a good experience that a system would provide to users.
For example, to explain this – consider you’re filling out a form and to avoid weak password strength there are some criteria mentioned already, this would be error prevention and while you enter an email and miss @ or .com, etc indicating that error in that field only would be error handling.
4. Recognition Rather Than Recall
It is very important to understand the value of recognition over recall while designing and evaluating interfaces. Recall relies on human memory, and to recall an old event might be difficult as we age such as where you left when you last opened the app, what you last spoke on call or what you added to the cart last time, etc. Whereas on the other hand, Recognition supports memory and through visual cues eases the remembrance such as “You’ve added these jeans to your cart, do you want to proceed to buy it”.
The clash between recall and recognition is due to “Limited Short Term Memory”, therefore trying to push users to recall an event increases cognitive load. Thus as designers focus on making this easily recognizable.
5. Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
To evaluate designs that are pleasing to the user, this heuristic principle is used. It is generally done using a “5-sec design test”, where a bunch of 3 to 5 design variants are picked and shown to the user, whichever design or screen elements they remember is something which they relate to the most.
To carry out this 5-second test, give your user five seconds to look at the designs before removing it and then ask what the screen is for, what the main action is that you want users to perform, what you remember from the screen which was shown to you, etc. Doing this test, you’ll find what is working and what can be improved in the designs.
6. Help users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover From Errors
This heuristic states that users should be given proper alerts and indications of what error has occurred, what can be done to resolve it, and how they can get back to the initial state and retry. A good design would always handle and recover from that state in a user-centric manner, letting users know what happened and how it is resolved.
For example: Whenever you try to make a payment, it fails. Do you get the option to retry or if not retry then what went wrong while making the payment? (i.e. was it due to network, bank server, or account balance). This user is completely assured that nothing wrong happened, and things are sorted.
The intent of this heuristic is to “never leave a user miserable” thinking about what happened.
7. Consistent System Standards
From the last article, you must have read about “Jacob’s Law”, which was all about similarity, reference, and consistency of design patterns and interfaces. This heuristic also talks about consistency and standards to be maintained while designing interfaces. By consistency, we mean to say, keep things the same as shown and expected by the user. Don’t surprise them with new elements, colors, and content every time they take any action or navigate through the system. Keep all your screen elements consistent through channels(such as logos, packaging, etc as well). A product rich with consistency has a better brand identity in front of the users.
For example, Amazon has a lot of different products including a shopping app, music app, and video streaming app. But one thing which is kept intact is the brand identity through these many apps.
Consistency within a channel and among different channels should be balanced. Keep the colors consistent as per their usage, and keep buttons and their appearance consistent to allow users easily detect and act upon them.
8. User Control and Freedom
Sometimes you must have encountered a situation where you have accidentally tapped on a screen and have landed on a screen where you don’t have any idea what to do. In such cases what a user first looks out for is an “Exit” point. Be clear with exits, and states where you make users enter through an action. Make it very clear how they can escape or enter a screen.
Research and look for entry points where users tend to make these mistakes or study user journeys where mistakes are more likely to be made or when users are most likely to want to edit information, or just want to simply exit, and find ways to make that task as easy and simple as possible.
9. Flexibility and Efficiency of Use
This heuristic principle talks about how to evaluate designs based on their efficiency and flexibility of it. There are times when shortcuts come in handy, like keyboard shortcuts for games, Figma, etc. These shortcuts make work easy and life sorted while working with time constraints. Also, do not just shortcuts, keep track of what has been used previously. Save these shortcuts for next time when manually created by the user.
Efficiency can also be measured through what is placed on the screen and how useful those screen elements are. Make the software easier to use by cleaning up the screen. Only pertinent UI components and actions should ever be visible on the app’s screen.
10. Help and Documentation
This heuristic principle states that “The usability of a product depends on providing clear, succinct, and pertinent documentation” that is simple to obtain and comprehend such as onboarding and tooltips. This comes as helps users to get a context of what can be done on a particular app. Basically, to explain this, we can say that whenever a user needs help or context around a state, he/she should not fight to find it, in fact, it should be easily available to them. This is not an optional “extra” step in terms of design but a very crucial and essential component of your offerings.
A nuisance of this heuristic could be, to balance out between help and overhead help. Make things obvious and readily available for the user but don’t overdo anything.
11. Inclusive Accessibility
Many times it is encountered that people with disabilities are left out while designing interfaces. “Disability is not because of an individual, it is because of society”, and it is true in a sense. Society discriminates between normal and abnormal beings. This heuristics talks about accessibility in design, such that it is usable by all equally.
While using color schemes, take care of the vision disabilities like color blindness, which is a major problem among populations across the globe. In research, it is found that around 9% of males and 0.5% of females population have color blindness.
Always try to add alt text for images, make the target(button) at least 48px to 56px (the size of the average human thumb), and also use familiar icons to avoid cognitive load. By designing with keeping accessibility in mind, a design would be good for everyone whether they have any disability or not.
Heuristic evaluation is critical and that’s why it can be done at any point in the process of designing to check or monitor designs as per users. It is useful for iteration, so when you run it earlier, you’ll get more feedback. Carrying out quick feedback rounds after 80% of your designs are complete, would help in assessing designs and goals. To conduct an effective heuristic evaluation there are a few things that one should consider.
An effective way to use Heuristic Evaluation
The application of heuristics in design starts with building on a good user experience. Keep the heuristic evaluation on top of a good user experience, then only the results would be expected. You’ll be able to analyze what is good and what can be eventually improved after the heuristic evaluation is carried out. As said, now let’s look into “Effective way of how to conduct heuristic evaluations”:
- Be clear with “What do you want to test”? – Which means which feature or functionality do you want to check? Collate all wireframes, prototypes, and designs which you want to test before proceeding with the heuristic evaluation.
- Set test priority – Draw out what you want to test and what is the severity or priority of that feature to be evaluated. Consider the following while setting up your priority:
- Frequency – How commonly does this occurs, required or needed for the product to meet basic goals
- Persistence – Is this feature/action etc required once or repeatedly for a product to sustain?
- Retention/Impact – How would users respond to this? Would it be easy or difficult to sustain under this change or addition?
- The Process – How you want to carry out the heuristic evaluation because it can be done through the design team as well as with the help of specialized agencies or evaluators. It would be purely the org-level decision that is important to be analyzed based on budget, time, and effort.
- Heuristic Evaluation Phase – Here you check designs based on the above-mentioned pointers then collect and collate data into sheets which would be evaluated further.
- Analysis – Whatever data has been collected through the actual evaluation process, now it is the time to sit and analyze that data. Discuss with the agency/team or evaluator and have a healthy conversation about why, what, and how to improve the designs. Not just discussion, but plan out how to iterate over the feedback and when to roll out V2 for the respective feature.
- Iteration – It is the last step in the cycle, which would be to incorporate all the feedback you received. Then again carry out 1 or 2 rounds of feedback (depending on how many rounds are required).
Pros of Heuristic Evaluation
1. Faster Feedback
Heuristic evaluation actually helps in expediting the
process. With the help of known principles that are crucial resources, you can evaluate and get quick feedback from different teams.
2. Set up the right priority
To carry out heuristic evaluation one must have to sort usability issues into categories and address them in line with their seriousness. This lets the team also know what is critical to be picked first, rather than just jumping at once to pick up everything.
3. Comprehensive
The whole process of evaluating design based on the principles is very comprehensive. You get a detailed idea about why and what is going wrong as well as how you can fix it.
Cons of Heuristic Evaluation
1. Constraints
Time and money are 2 major constraints that can make up for taking a step back from carrying out multiple rounds of heuristic evaluation. For an early-stage startup, it would be difficult to invest money but at the same, it is of utmost crucial to get things fixed as early as possible.
2. Difficult to find “Experts”
There is a limited chunk of good subject matter experts when it comes to design, usability testing, and research. Getting the right person to help through the process is difficult to find.
3. Pseudo-Positive
Most cases of heuristic evaluation do wonders, but in a few cases, it can backfire as well. Heuristic-based issues that are detected may not always result in a poor user experience. It is good to know that everything worked but depends upon how the evaluation is carried out. Experienced and skilled folks would tend to help better.
Conclusion
In this article, we have seen what heuristic evaluation is, what are the different principles of Heuristic evaluation, how to carry out an effective heuristic evaluation, and the pros & cons of it. As a designer, it is good to be aware of these, so that you can leverage these heuristics during your self-review of designs. You yourself can do a quick review of designs based on what can be done better and what is already enhancing the user experience of a particular digital product.
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