Find five things wrong with an app you use every day.
Pick an app you use daily and find one violation of each of five Jakob Nielsen heuristics below. No login, no download; print it or copy it into your notes.
What to look for.
These are five of the ten usability heuristics defined by Jakob Nielsen in 1994, still used by UX teams today to check whether a product is working for the people using it. The explanations below are our own, written for beginners — see the credit at the bottom of this page for the original source.
Visibility of system status
The app should always tell you what's happening -- loading, saved, sent, failed -- without you having to guess or wait and wonder.
Match between the system and the real world
Words, icons and order should match how you already think about the task, not how the engineering team organised the database.
User control and freedom
You should be able to back out of an action, undo a mistake, or cancel a process without it feeling like a fight against the app.
Consistency and standards
The same word, icon or action should mean the same thing everywhere in the app -- and should work the way similar apps have already taught you to expect.
Recognition rather than recall
The app should show you your options rather than making you remember them from a previous screen or a menu you saw five minutes ago.
Fill in one row per heuristic.
One sentence is enough for each: what's wrong, and what you'd change. Print this page, or copy the structure into a notes app.
Row 1 — Visibility of system status
What's wrong:
What you'd change:
Row 2 — Match between the system and the real world
What's wrong:
What you'd change:
Row 3 — User control and freedom
What's wrong:
What you'd change:
Row 4 — Consistency and standards
What's wrong:
What you'd change:
Row 5 — Recognition rather than recall
What's wrong:
What you'd change:
Where these come from.
These five heuristics are drawn from Jakob Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics for user interface design, first published in 1994 and still in wide use. The explanations above are our own plain-English wording, written for beginners — not a copy of the original text. Read the full set of ten, in Nielsen’s own words, at nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics.
Want feedback on what you found?
No pitch, no obligation — just a quick look at what you have made and an honest answer on what's next.