10 usability heuristics every designer should know
Aesthetic And Minimalististic Design

A minimalism is not only a fashion of last few years, but it certainly is a lasting trend with the aim to reduce the description of a subject just to its necessary elements. It has many applications in art, music, and literature. Minimalism helps users to quickly access important information and come to the result quickly.

”Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

To let the remaining content stand out, you can use nothing but whitespace. It helps to increase content legibility, it highlights call to actions, and creates a balanced and pleasant look [8]. A minimal design uses only the necessary colours to support the visual hierarchy. Think about the purpose and meaning of each color. Use it consistently.

Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, And Recover From Errors

Errors and issues of any kind can be frustrating for the user. Especially when they’re poorly designed and communicated. Whether we want it or not, users always tend to get themselves into situations that they need to find a way out of. To minimize the frustration, we should put as much effort into designing error experience as we put into the rest of system.

Bad example of the error message which is neither clear or useful for the user.

Every error message should be as explicit and precise as possible. Nobody wants to read vague messages like “something went wrong.” State what happened in a readable human language. Messages like “Class error 372,” are just as absurd. Give the user some constructive advice on what to do next. Propose the solution or direct the user to a customer support employee who can handle the situation. The last rule of good error messages is politeness. Never blame the user or imply that they’re stupid.

Great example of the error message which immediately suggests the next steps.

Help And Documentation

Every app should strive to be perfectly usable without any documentation, but as we mentioned before, every user has different skills and different levels of knowledge, and what is easy for 90% of your users might be difficult for the remaining 10%. Well written documentation, FAQs, and tutorials might be crucial for retaining the stunned user.

Documentation should be well structured, written in a human language, and minimalist. Sometimes, users don‘t need a whole lot of documentation; a simple coachmark showing how the new feature works or a brief onboarding guide that explains the basics is enough. Apps like Trello, Slack, and Duolingo are doing a great job at onboarding their users.

Resources
['Michal Langmajer']
['Usability', 'UX', 'Product Management', 'Design Process', 'User Experience']