You may know the 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design; they’re nearly 20 years old and still a powerful toolkit for thinking about user experience design.
What are the 10 Usability Heuristics?
- 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, diagnose, and recover from errors
- Help and documentation
However, a bazillion user testing sessions have lead me to conclude that there is a significant omission when relating these heuristics to contemporary digital products: System Response.
Visibility of system status touches on this issue by recommending that: The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable time.
Good systems even set expectations about system response e.g. ‘85% done’ or ‘Getting 42 of 50 quotes’.
System response: the missing heuristic?
Even though feedback is often provided, which complies with the visibility of system status heuristic, I don’t believe this heuristic is powerful enough to describe the many services I’ve tested where system response is the single greatest user experience issue, for example:
- Behaviour: A spinner (e.g. the hour glass) informs the user that something is happening but that spinner seems to spin eternally
Result: The user thinks it’s knackered and starts to click about, often clicking the ‘back’ button - Behaviour: A button is touched/clicked and displays a mouse down state but nothing else happens
Result: The user thinks it’s knackered and starts to click about, often clicking the ‘back’ button - Behaviour: A page loads a few elements in, then seems to stall
Result: The user thinks it’s knackered and starts to click about, often clicking the ‘back’ button
This is a convoluted issue because system response is usually a technical problem with a technical fix and the above heuristics deal largely with interaction design issues and interaction design fixes.
That said, customers don’t give a fig about technical constraints so I think it fitting that we add system response to our user experience toolkit. Rather than modify the above heuristics, I would recommend adding this.
System Response: Slow systems, regardless of ‘visibility of system status’ cues, are frequently interpreted as failing systems. Continual and heroic efforts should be made to reduce a system’s response time.
Want to learn more:
- Certified Practitioner in User Experience: Foundation course
- Training course: Beyond Usability
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