Usability Heuristics

A set of ten general principles for user interface design developed by Jakob Nielsen (originally with Rolf Molich in 1990, refined in 1994): visibility of system status, match between 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 recognise and recover from errors, and help and documentation. They are the canonical framework for heuristic evaluation in HCI but were not designed with accessibility or disability in mind, so using them alone tends to surface fewer and less diverse accessibility issues than accessibility-specific methods.