# Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics

**Track:** Principles of Good Design — Design & Human-Centered Design — proposed (25)
**Framework / surface:** design
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** Affordances, Signifiers & Feedback

**In one line:** Ten heuristics as a fast, shared lens for evaluating an interface.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Heuristic evaluation is usability's cheapest lens: a few inspectors judge an interface against a short list of principles instead of recruiting users. Jakob Nielsen and Rolf Molich introduced the method in 1990, and Nielsen refined the set into the canonical "10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design" in 1994 — visibility of system status, match between system and the real world, user control and freedom, consistency, error prevention, recognition over recall, and the rest. He framed it as "discount usability engineering": three to five evaluators surface most serious problems for a fraction of a lab study's cost. The Nielsen Norman Group still publishes the ten as design's default evaluative vocabulary.

## References

- [Heuristic evaluation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_evaluation)
- [10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/)
- [Jakob Nielsen (usability consultant)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Nielsen_(usability_consultant))