A continuation of the last post.

Heuristics are rules of thumb to check wether something is usable. The rules I explain here are written by Jacob Nielsen.

Recognition rather than recall

The short term memory of the average can have 7 items in it. So, if your menu has 10 different buttons, chances are they’ll not be able to remember what is in there. Meaning they’ll have to read it back.

The same goes for other things. Suppose you have a form and you get a code to check wether you’re a real user. (Normally distorted numbers) You could do that on a different page, making people remember the 7 digits. But why would you make it hard for them?

Flexibility and efficiency of use

By making a site easy usable by novice users you might actually make it harder for advance users that already know where they want to go. MyYahoo is a nice example of this. It’s easy to use for the novice. But the more experienced user can change that page to how they like it. Great usability!

Aesthetic and minimalist design

http://www.sportjaar2005.nl/. This website has a rather minimalistic design, eventhough there are a million links on it. Because of this, it is still relatively easy to find what you’re looking for while still have a nice looking site.

Also, don’t put any extra information in already crowded places, it’ll just distract you from the real message.

Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors

You spend 10 minutes filling out a horrible form press send and… you get the same form again, but empty. That is a really good example of how not to do things. Give a clear message saying that the form was send correctly, but that some fields weren’t filled out correctly and clearly mark those fields. Or, even better, only show the wrongly filled out forms again.

Help and documentation

Either you’ve made a really complicated application, or users need to be able to teach themselves how to use it. Or you might even suspect your users to be not so smart*. Whatever the reason, you should provide help and documentation for everything but the simpelest site.

* Users are never dumb. If the user doesn’t get it, you were wrong in how you made it.

Related posts

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 10:00 by Sonja Duijvesteijn and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.