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.

The browser is an excellent tool. It's ubiquitous, simple to operate, and extremely powerful. What's more, it is almost entirely composed of useful surfaces. The window design (like an actual window) is focused on the content, with minimal but functional tools for navigating that content—and increasingly, even those tools are being hidden or marginalized.

There is one part of the browser, however, that has not changed since the earliest days of pre-graphical clients: the URL bar. It is the one piece of the browser UI that has remained opaque to end users. Even the status bar and advanced preference panes are framed in plain English: "Loading images…", "Disallow script?", "Could not connect to server". These are all things that bring obscure information to the top layer of user experience in plain, direct English. Even if the user can't react to the information or even comprehend it, they appreciate being addressed in their own language. Why is the URL bar the sole survivor of command line language being presented to the user?

Guidelines and heuristics are not interchangeable, but many UXers treat them that way. It’s common to hear someone saying that they’re doing a heuristic evaluation against X guidelines. But it doesn’t quite work like that.

“Let’s check this against the Nielsen guidelines for intranets,” she said. We were three quarters of the way through completing wireframes for a redesign. We had spent four months doing user research, card sorting, prototyping, iterating, and testing (a lot). At the time, going back to the Nielsen Norman Group guidelines seemed like a really good idea. “Okay,” I said. “I’m all for reviewing designs from different angles.”

There were 614 guidelines.

Every user experience researcher I know gets requests to do heuristic evaluations. But it isn't always clear that the requester actually knows what is involved in doing a heuristic evaluation. That happens. If I had a dollar for every time someone called asking for a focus group when what they ended up needing was a usability test, I could take a very nice holiday on Aruba.

They've heard the buzzword. They might have heard that Jakob Neilsen had something to do with the method, so that adds something to the appeal (though I'm not sure what). And they know that someone who they hope is a "usability expert" can just tell them what's wrong. Right now.

Some clients who have asked me to do heuristic evaluations have picked up the term somewhere but often are not clear on the details. Typically, they have mapped "heuristic evaluation" to "usability audit," or something like that. It's close enough to start a conversation.