[Experience Design] People & Place 2: Usability Heuristics for designing an experience

Jakob Nielsen's 10 heuristics for interaction design:

Image source: https://thekevinscott.com/usability-heuristics-for-bots/

This article talks about

• My own definition/understanding of one of the heuristics,

• one example that does a good job of this,

• one example that does a bad job of this, and

• my learnings about creating and/or using heuristics/evaluative tools.

Heuristic Review: #5 Recognition rather than recall

1. My understanding:

Recognition rather than recall means lessening the responsibility of the user to remember certain information by providing cues that are visible, easily retrievable, or easily recognizable.

2. One example that does a good job of this:

Search/View History

Web services such as Google Search, Amazon, and Youtube offer search or view histories that can decrease the amount of recall a user has to do in order to revisit something that they experienced in the past.

Picture 1. My Youtube Watch History

Picture 2. My Amazon View History

Picture 3. My Google Search History

3. One example that does a bad job of this.

A bad example of requiring recall is if a package order tracking code is not linked to the related postal service, especially if access on mobile, with bad text copy & paste control. The user would have to memorize the tracking code, then re-write it on the postal service's website.

Picture 4. Package Tracking Code (This image is provided by my friend Anna Xuan.)

4. My learnings about creating and/or using heuristics/evaluative tools

Using the heuristics tools enables me to switch perspectives from a pure designer to a user, to empathize with users, and to think about what users truly need. To design and evaluate a place, designers should not only think about aesthetic, physical, and pragmatic needs, but also need to consider users’ habits, psychological needs and cultural backgrounds.

© Wenyi Gong 2019