Some time ago, Susan Weinschenk wrote about the psychologist’s view of UX design, listing a number of facts about the human mind that can be directly applied to interface design. And I think that’s an important point; although usability experts try to put the user in the center of every step of the design process, formalized principles and best practices usually only address technical aspects of the development of interfaces. That’s the case with most of the principles used when evaluating interfaces in heuristic evaluations.
So why don’t we use Susan’s psychological facts as heuristic principles when evaluating interfaces, instead of just the technical ones? To that end, I have translated Susan’s points into a checklist of heuristic principles that can be used to evaluate interfaces. I have created it in the form of a spreadsheet to make evaluations easier. Here you have it:
Psychological Usability Heuristics spreadsheet (Google Docs)
