Jakob Nielsen and his work
Since the nineties, the consultant, author and speaker Jakob Nielsen has been the favorite companion of many researchers and designers in the fields of usability and user experience as they travel and explore these territories, applied to all kinds of products and services.
His foundations and theories are still an important input today for developing user-centered interfaces: first getting to know users’ wishes and needs, and then creating products and services that exceed their expectations and improve their quality of life.
Among his theories, the 10 usability heuristics stand out, giving us a solid basis for evaluating the usability of any kind of interface:
- Visibility of system status
- Match between the system and the real world
- User control and freedom
- Consistency and standards
- Error prevention
- Recognition rather than recall
- Flexibility and efficiency of use
- Aesthetic and minimalist design
- Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors
- Help and documentation
These principles were put forward and developed in collaboration with Rolf Molich in 1990 and have since had some modifications and updates.
As a single evaluation method, the principles were quite useful when the interaction between users and interfaces didn’t yet have the advances in aesthetics and functionality, touch devices, voice control and the integration of new elements such as virtual and augmented reality.
Even so, they’re still the number-one tool for many researchers and designers when evaluating interfaces.
Beyond the 10 heuristics of the nineties
To evaluate whether the experience of using a product or service is convenient and pleasant, you need to consider the following concepts, which have been standardized over the years by organizations such as Nielsen Norman Group and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), among others:
- Learnability: how quickly and easily users can learn to use an interface for the first time.
- Efficiency: how an interface lets users reach their goals quickly and with the minimum effort necessary.
- Utility: providing the features users need.
- Memorability: an interface’s ability to be remembered and recognized by users even after a long period of time.
- Satisfaction: the positive, pleasant feeling users experience after using an interface.
If we had to evaluate an interface today using Nielsen and Molich’s 10 heuristics, we’d only get results for learnability, efficiency and errors, since these principles only consider how easily, quickly and with how little memorization users can use a product or service.
So we leave out the three remaining concepts: utility, memorability and satisfaction. On top of that, we’re not taking into account aspects that matter for certain products or services, such as conversion.
But how can we include them when we carry out a usability and user experience evaluation?
The good news is that we don’t only have Nielsen and Molich’s 10 heuristics. Many consultants, specialists, researchers and designers have devoted time to finding and formulating alternatives for evaluating multiple aspects of products and services.
Among them, Leena Arhippainen stands out, a user experience researcher and lecturer at the University of Oulu in Finland, who put forward 10 heuristics for analyzing how a product or service exceeds users’ expectations and how it can surprise them and take the experience to another level of satisfaction.
We also have the 10 principles for good design proposed by the German designer Dieter Rams, which, although originally applied only to industrial design, can today evaluate an interface from other perspectives, for example at an ethical level.
And why not carry out an analysis from a psychological angle, through concepts such as variable rewards, those elements of surprise that are introduced to make something more attractive; or using the Kano model, which focuses on differentiating the features of a product or service and not just on meeting users’ needs.
In conclusion, the methods and concepts available to researchers and designers for evaluating a product or service cover every angle of usability and user experience.
It’s up to us to find a holistic way that includes different evaluation paths, adapts to the specific needs of companies’ projects and, at the same time, lets us create and deliver satisfying experiences for users.
Credits
I research how people think, feel, and act in order to design digital experiences grounded in real data. I specialize in qualitative testing (usability, field studies, interviews) and encourage companies to build from evidence, not assumptions.
