Nielsen's usability heuristics

In 1994, usability guru Jakob Nielsen came up with a list of 10 general principles for designing user interfaces. They're as relevant today as they were then.

1. Keep users informed about what's going on.
2. Follow real-world conventions. Use concepts and language familiar to the user.
3. Enable users to easily undo mistakes.
4. Be consistent and follow platform conventions.
5. Prevent errors.
6. Minimise the load on the user's memory. Make things obvious.
7. Cater to both inexperienced and experienced users.
8. Omit what's unnecessary.
9. Make it easy for users to understand, diagnose and recover from errors.
10. Provide specific, task-oriented documentation.

I'll dig into some of these in more detail in future posts.