Nielsen’s Ten Heuristic Principles

Nielsen’s Ten Heuristic Principles are a set of ten guidelines for designing user interfaces that are easy to use. The principles are:

• Visibility of system status: Keep users informed about what is happening with the system, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time.
• Match between system and the real world: Use words, phrases, and concepts that are familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented terms. Follow real-world conventions, making information appear in a natural and logical order.
• User control and freedom: Allow users to easily recover from errors and undo actions.
• Consistency and standards: Use consistent terminology and conventions throughout the system.
• Error prevention: Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place. Either eliminate error-prone conditions or check for them and present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action.
• Recognition rather than recall: Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.
• Flexibility and efficiency of use: Accelerators — unseen by the novice user — may often speed up the interaction for the experienced user such as by allowing shortcuts with non-textual navigation modes, such as shortcut keys, function keys, or special mouse buttons. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
• Aesthetic and minimalist design: Dialogues should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units and diminishes their relative visibility.
• Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors: Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.
• Help and documentation: Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a field of study that focuses on the design and development of interactive systems that are easy and efficient to use. HCI guidelines are recommendations that can be used to design and develop user interfaces that are more user-friendly and effective.