Analyzing UI Design with Nielsen's Heuristics: CSIS 505 Assignment

This homework assignment analyzes the application of Jakob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics to user interface (UI) design, specifically focusing on the principle of system status visibility. The student examines a complex UI design, identifying violations of this principle. The assignment details the importance of providing users with clear and timely feedback, ensuring they are informed about the system's current state and the progress of their actions. The solution discusses how the chosen UI design fails to provide adequate indicators of system activity, potentially confusing and frustrating users. The analysis incorporates a scholarly source to support the arguments, highlighting the significance of heuristic evaluation in identifying and addressing usability issues. The assignment concludes by emphasizing the importance of system status visibility as a core principle for creating a positive user experience. The student also provides an overview of how this principle can be applied in an interactive interface design. The assignment also provides a detailed overview of how the system is well interactive to communicate with the system and how the system keeps updating information to the user through an appropriate feedback message within a reasonable time.

Running head: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Information Technology
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................2
Nielsen’s ten heuristics usability................................................................................................2
Alignments of the selected principle represent facts..................................................................4
Result Research..........................................................................................................................5
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................6
References..................................................................................................................................7

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Introduction
Jakob Nielsen conducted an extensive research over designing user interface and
identified a group of ten heuristics, or interface design principles, that provide guidelines for
an interactive interface design. Heuristics can be defined as “rules of thumb”. Nielsen’s ten
heuristics rules are based on derivations. In this report, we will discuss about Jakob Nielsen’s
10 principles with their description. Next we will discuss, one of the ten’s heuristics usability
and discuss whether it violates or follows that principle. Finally, the alignments of the
selected principle will not distort the reality of the principle is discussed.
Discussion
Heuristics evaluation consists of a series of inspection process for an interface
usability problems. It comprises both the predictive (before design completion) method as
well as the rating and evaluation (after design) method (Casare & et al., 2016). The heuristic
evaluation can be used to identify the problem of users in an interface design. So that they
can be able to attend an interactive design process (Choma, Zaina & Beraldo, 2015).
Heuristic evaluation technique involves a group of evaluators (ranges from five to seven)
those are used to examine the usability and compatibility principles of the interface.
Nielsen’s ten heuristics usability
The following are Nielsen’s ten principles for an interactive interface design:

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i. Visibility and usability of the system: This principle defines that the user
always keeps informed about the current system through an appropriate
feedback along with reasonable time.
ii. Freedom and user control: In some situation user choose some of the
functionality of the system by mistake and they need to exit from this
unwanted state immediately (Gonzalez-Holland & et al., 2017). Hence the
system must support redo and undo.
iii. Error prevention: An interface is called well designed, if it successfully
eliminate and check error prone conditions and having a confirmation option
for the user to commit an action.
iv. Match between real world and the system: The system should be capable of
understand user language, concepts and phrases rather system oriented words.
v. Efficiency and flexibility to use: Accelerator, hidden from the trainee user,
may sometimes increase the system speed for both expert user and
inexperienced user.
vi. Standards and consistency: This principle defines that the system should be
able to understand different words, actions or situations of common thing.
vii. Minimalist and aesthetic design: This define the system contains relevant
information.
viii. Documentation and help provision: It is necessary to give the user a
better documentation for searching, provide a user guidelines and phases to be
follow.
ix. Recognition instead of recall: Reduced the user’s memory load creating
options, objects and actions.

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x. Help users diagnose, recognize, and recovery from error: The error messages
are expressed by plain language, indicate the accurate problem,
Jakob Nielsen’s first heuristic of 10 heuristic usability principles is system status
visibility, it is highly related to interactive interface design (Hermawati & Lawson,
2016). It can be used to define how the system is well interactive to communicate
with the system. This rules are widely used by the interface designers, usability
professionals which helps them to quickly identify various problems related to system
interface design. It is simple and cost efficient technique to design an interface
quickly. The system keeps updating information to the user through an appropriate
feedback message within a reasonable time (Jimenez, Lozada & Rosas, 2016). To
simplify the transparency and communication is the main aspects of it. In most of the
situation, people try to control and predict more information for making a better
decision. An interactive interface always informed their users if the interaction is
successfully established whenever make an interaction with the system.
Alignments of the selected principle represent facts
An interactive process should be as simple as possible to do necessary task with few
clicks such as change the process state by clicking a button, progress updating about the
running processes (Pribeanu, 2017). This principle also describes the internal processing of
the system and keep the user aware about it. The interface provide TCP/IP configuration to
the system. It gives a user interface where the user configure with the system securely. The
user can select user name to configure with the network. The TCP/IP network configuration
interface involves multiple menus, which gives a complicated overview to the users. The

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interface to the given system is not well designed and interactive. The basic guideline for an
interactive user-interface design include the appropriate feedback process given to the user
action (Quiñones & Rusu, 2017). The interface should always serve the information about the
current status to the users as well as allow users to control the interaction in the right
direction with less effort and time. Therefore, the user need to be aware about the processes
keep going inside the system. The different ways of indicating visibility of a system by
including different indicators such as images, options, subheadings, etc. An appropriate icon
can be used to make the system more accurate to the users to understand the website activity.
The progress-bar may be used in the interface which will display the progress update about
the action. In addition, an animated loader will make process to be completed in intermediate
time (Quiñones, Rusu & Rusu, 2018). The feedback message section should be included in
the interface that is the name changes are save successfully.
Result Research
Therefore, from the above discussion the fact is clear that the “visibility of the system status”
is an important heuristic principle for creating an interactive user interface with custom
functionalities. This feature will help users to process any action and give feedback within a
reasonable time which indicate that the system is responding. The controls should be clearly
visible to the user so that they must be conscious about the availability and easily cope up
with the system. It is important to design a clear image of the interface, so that the user can be
able to understand the utility of each of the options available in the current page. This is the
effectiveness of an interactive interface in the computer science designing concept.

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Conclusion
It can be concluded from the above discussion that the system status visibility is a
primary trust of a better user experience. The heuristics usability inspires continuous and
open communication is the centre of all relationship weather with devices or people. The
Nielsen’s usability principle ensure the right directions in the designing of an interface.

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References
Casare, A. R., da Silva, C. G., Martins, P. S., & Moraes, R. L. (2016, April). Usability
heuristics and accessibility guidelines: a comparison of heuristic evaluation and
WCAG. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM Symposium on applied computing
(pp. 213-215). ACM.
Choma, J., Zaina, L. A., & Beraldo, D. (2015, August). Communication of design decisions
and usability issues: a protocol based on Personas and Nielsen’s heuristics. In
International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 163-174). Springer,
Cham.
Gonzalez-Holland, E., Whitmer, D., Moralez, L., & Mouloua, M. (2017, September).
Examination of the Use of Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics & Outlooks for the
Future. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual
Meeting (Vol. 61, No. 1, pp. 1472-1475). Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE
Publications.
Hermawati, S., & Lawson, G. (2016). Establishing usability heuristics for heuristics
evaluation in a specific domain: Is there a consensus?. Applied ergonomics, 56, 34-51.
Jimenez, C., Lozada, P., & Rosas, P. (2016, September). Usability heuristics: A systematic
review. In 2016 IEEE 11th Colombian Computing Conference (CCC) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
Pribeanu, C. (2017). A revised set of usability heuristics for the evaluation of interactive
systems. Informatica Economica, 21(3), 31.

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Quiñones, D., & Rusu, C. (2017). How to develop usability heuristics: A systematic literature
review. Computer Standards & Interfaces, 53, 89-122.
Quiñones, D., Rusu, C., & Rusu, V. (2018). A methodology to develop usability/user
experience heuristics. Computer Standards & Interfaces, 59, 109-129.