Nielsen's 10 heuristics are still your fastest critique tool

Jakob Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics, first published in 1994, remain the quickest way to sanity-check a screen before user testing. They're not glamorous, but they still catch real problems fast.

Nielsen's heuristics — visibility of system status, error prevention, recognition over recall, and so on — were published in 1994 and have barely aged, because they describe how people think, not how tools work. NN/g still teaches them as the fastest structured critique method available. For a junior designer, heuristic evaluation is a low-stakes way to build critique muscle before you're confident running full usability tests. It's cheap, it's fast, and it gives you language for feedback that sounds considered rather than just 'I don't like it.' This is established, not trending — it's been core practice for three decades and isn't going anywhere.

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