The critique vocabulary – Nielsen's ten heuristics

Jakob Nielsen published ten usability heuristics in 1994; Nielsen Norman Group still maintains them (last revised January 2024) because they’ve held up across three decades of interfaces that didn’t exist when they were written. They’re the closest thing usability has to a shared rulebook – and for you they’re leverage: naming the specific rule being broken is design feedback that lands, from someone with no design title.

The ten, in plain language – each with the tell you’d spot in the wild:

1. Visibility of system status – the product always tells you what’s going on, promptly. Tell: you click Save and nothing confirms it happened.
2. Match with the real world – the product speaks your language, in the order you’d expect, not internal jargon. Tell: a button labelled “Sync entity revisions”.
3. User control and freedom – mistakes need a clearly marked exit. Tell: a multi-step wizard with no way back or out.
4. Consistency and standards – same thing, same name, same look – and platform conventions respected. Tell: “Delete”, “Remove” and “Discard” all meaning the same action on different screens.
5. Error prevention – the best error message is the one that never fires, because the design removed the trap. Tell: a date field that lets you type February 30th, then scolds you.
6. Recognition rather than recall – options visible, never memorised across screens. Tell: “enter the code shown on the previous page”.
7. Flexibility and efficiency – shortcuts for experts that novices never see. Tell: power users doing a five-click dance for their fiftieth time today.
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design – every extra element competes with the ones that matter. This is The Eye’s hierarchy discipline arriving from the usability literature – two fields converging on the same rule independently is decent evidence it’s real.
9. Recognise, diagnose, recover from errors – plain-language messages that say what went wrong and what to do. Tell: “Error 4012”.
10. Help and documentation – ideally unnecessary; findable and task-focused when it isn’t.

Use them as a diagnostic, not a generator

The heuristics don’t design screens – they diagnose them. The practical move: run a screen against the list and name the number. “This breaks #6 – the user has to remember what they picked on the last screen” is actionable in a review and executable in an agent prompt; “this feels inconsistent” is a mood. Precision compounds too – an agent given a numbered violation fixes that violation, not its guess at your vibe.

Try the diagnostic on a screen with five planted violations:

Five violations, one screen

Click the part that breaks a rule, then name the rule

Vault · workspace settingsStep 3 of 3Finish

Error 4012.

Workspace ID (shown on the previous screen)Purge orphaned artefactsSave changesApplyUpdate

0/5 named

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