What are usability heuristics?

Usability heuristics, also known as Nielsen's heuristics, are 10 broad guidelines that designers follow when creating user interfaces. Developed by Jakob Nielsen in 1994, these principles are still valid and are widely used by UX designers and researchers.^[1]

Usability heuristics don't give specific usability guidelines. They provide a general understanding of user behavior in certain situations and help build more intuitive products with a great user experience.

The process of evaluating interfaces and identifying usability problems is called heuristic evaluation. It's the cheapest and easiest usability testing method that can be used at the very early stages of product development when the budget is limited.