Hi, today I want to talk about 10 usability heuristics by Jakob Nielsen. And those were created in 1994 by Danish usability expert Jakob Nielsen. So it's quite a long time ago, but they are still valid because they are heuristics. And what does it mean is that they are very high level principles that you can apply to many things, but mostly for user interfaces. And they are very universal.
You can also... use it as a checklist to check if existing product is good or bad, like the usability is good or bad, and go one by one and see how the final results are. When creating the product, definitely you need to check every single item that it's basically done. So, they talk about usability and how usability relates to user experience. So, if a product is easy to use, the usability is good and the user experience is also good.
So they are very closely related. But how exactly the relation looks like? So let's take a look.
OK, so we have user experience and on what parts, what elements of user of product you can really assess a user, like measure the user experience. So. For sure there is usability.
So if usability is good, the user experience is also good. And what's more? The core element of any product is to provide some kind of value to users.
If you want to buy tickets, this is the value that you get out of the product. So you can measure the user experience on the value that the product provides. If it provides a lot of value for the user, the user experience is very high. So this is the same relation as usability.
So we have value and usability and we can also have interface. So basically user goal is to get value from the product. And they can get this value using the interface. And while they are getting this value, we can also measure the usability. So value, usability and interface.
And we can have one more thing here, which is brand. So this is something that always presents in any kind of product. Even if it has only a name, it's still a brand.
So you have experience with a brand, good or bad. Those are elements that... you can measure user experience on. And if we want to go a little bit into details, we can say that in the interface, it might be like the graphic user interface or voice user interface.
For usability, what matters is user flows and also information architecture. So basically, if user flows are optimized, the application, the product is easy to use, so usability is rising. If the information architecture is good, the users can find information quickly and so the usability is also good and the user experience is good. Accessibility is also here because If, for example, the contrast is very low, users may have problems and they can't find information.
So the usability is getting worse. So those are just examples. There are more things here.
But what's the most important is these elements that we can measure user experience on. So those are 10 usability heuristics that I grouped into four categories. So it will it's easy to remember them. And basically what does it mean is that the user interface should be familiar, should empower user, should be clear and should avoid errors.
And there are a couple of heuristics inside each of the groups. So let's go one by one. And the first one is the visibility of system status. And for that one, a good example is iPhone and the home screen when you basically have a lot of statuses.
So first one is hour, then we have the signal strength, then Wi-Fi, battery, day to day, number of messages. And also another clock. One more status which is on the side.
And this is a silent mode. So status is very useful for giving information for the user about what's going on. And this is very important information.
And I would say that this first heuristic is the most important one. Okay, the second one is a match between the system and the real world. And here a good example is when you are paying online, you basically need to fill all the data of your credit card.
Yeah, the credit card is a real world and the interface is virtual, like digital world. So this makes it very clear that there is a connection between the digital world and the real world. And the second example is any kind of online e-commerce platforms, shops. when you have a bag or a shopping cart.
And those are things that you can only actually have in a physical store, not in the digital world. So calling it this way makes it very easy for users to understand how they work because they resemble the real world. The next heuristic is number six and it's recognition rather than recall.
So what's recognition and what's recall? Recognition is... basically when you see a person on the street, you can see that you know this person or you don't know this person.
And it's very easy and fast for your brain to process. And to recall is when you actually want to know what's the name of the person that you know. And this is more difficult and it takes more time to remember the exact name.
So to make the interface easier, you have to use recognition rather than recall whenever it's possible. And the example you can see even in Sketch when you have open recent and you have the list of recent files. So you don't have to remember that yesterday you were working on this file that was in this folder that was in some place.
Basically, you don't need to recall. You just see the name of the file and you just know instantly that you are searching for this file. And the second example.
for this is also in Sketch and you can see the font list. So instead of remembering the exact name, you don't have to even remember the name. You just see the typeface and you know that this is the one that you are looking for.
The next category is empowering users. And the first heuristic here is number three, user control and freedom. And we can have two examples.
The first one is the iPhone home button, which is basically a way of escaping the state that you don't know what's going on. And I think the purpose of this button was exactly this. So because my iPhones were innovative and new to people. So if they ever got into this state that they don't know what's going on, they can press home button and they go back home and everything is. cleared for them and they can start over. And the second example is in Gmail when we after we send a message we can even undo it.
So it's very powerful and it gives a lot of control to the user because most of the time if we send the message then we start thinking about maybe something wrong here. So we can view the message, we can undo the message and yeah we have a lot of freedom and a lot of control here. And the next heuristic here is number seven, flexibility and efficiency of use.
And this is because there are many kinds of users, beginners, advanced users, and they all should be able to use the product efficiently. So a good example here is our keyboard shortcuts and beginner users basically don't use them and that's okay. Advanced users may use them if they want and both users can use exactly the same interface, but in a different way.
So yeah, that's flexibility. And next example is in Notion. So we can use shortcuts if you want, but if you don't want, you can just use the dropdowns to, for example, select a type of list, number this, bullet list, and so on. But if you are a power user, you can use the keyboard shortcuts and make it even faster to create any kind of... and other things also.
And the last heuristic is number 10, help and documentation. So not every product needs... documentation or help because some products, especially those very simple, are easy to learn by intuition. You basically follow what you think this product is going to do and it does exactly this.
So you don't need any kind of help. But more complex products like, let's say, Slack, they need some kind of help and documentation so everything is there and users can learn how to use the product. then they don't have to contact Slack and ask a lot of questions.
So it's very convenient both for the user and for the product owners. Yeah, and also when you figure out most of the product functionality by yourself, by using intuition, you always have this question on the back of your mind that maybe there is some feature that I didn't discover and I just want to know everything that's possible. So I go to the documentation and read everything.
And now I am clear, I know what's possible and what's not. And the next category is that the user interface should be clear for the users. And the first heuristic is number four, which is consistency and standards.
And we can see it very vividly in any kind of Google app which uses material design. And if we take a look at Gmail, Google Calendar or Google Maps, We can see that they are very consistent. If we know Gmail, we can start using calendar right away and everything is clear for us from the first interaction. Also, a good example are any kind of style guides or design systems that are very good at creating consistency and standards.
So, yeah, you should definitely use them if you want to have consistent product. And the second one. Here is number eight, which is aesthetics and minimalist design. And a very good example is the iOS control center, when everything is aligned to a grid and very clear.
For example, on the volume control, you even don't have any kind of text because they are not necessary. You can understand very clearly that you are controlling the volume. So every information that is not necessary, not important, is just not here.
And the aesthetics, the grid layout, event spacing and so on, they create this feeling that this is very clean and readable and you can understand what's on the screen and what you can do with it. And the last category is the interface should avoid errors. And the first heuristic here is number five, error prevention.
And a good example is any kind of creating an account screens when you have to set up a password. And. On a password field, you can possibly have a lot of errors and it could be really pain to match all the criteria that are here for this field.
Take a look at this example. We have four criterias that are showing you if they are matched or not while you type. So basically, you cannot create an error here.
It's impossible to create an error. So yeah, that's a very good example. And the last heuristic is...
Number nine, which is help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors. And a good example is Google Maps. When you basically type something that doesn't exist and you have a couple of hints that can help you recover from this error. Maybe you just misspelled something or place just don't exist on the Google Maps, but exist in the real world. So we can add this place.
And yeah, basically this error is very easy to recover. So that's a good example. So that's all for this video. Let me know if you use the usability heuristics, if you find it helpful or not.
What's your experience with it? And thanks for watching and see you next time.