Heuristic Evaluation Still Earns Its Keep in 2025

Nielsen's usability heuristics remain a go-to lightweight method for catching obvious UX problems before user testing, decades after they were written. It's boring, reliable, and still worth learning properly.

No new framework this week — just a reminder that Nielsen's 10 usability heuristics, first published in the 1990s, are still one of the fastest ways to catch obvious problems (unclear feedback, inconsistent patterns, poor error messages) before you spend budget on user testing. Design literature keeps returning to heuristic evaluation because it works: cheap, fast, and doesn't need recruiting. It won't catch everything — it's not a substitute for talking to real users — but as a junior designer, it's a method you can run solo on your own work or a portfolio project with zero budget. Established practice like this rarely gets hype-cycle attention, but it's the kind of fundamental interviewers expect you to know cold.

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