Usability heuristics are still the fastest self-review

Nielsen Norman Group's decades-old heuristic evaluation method remains the quickest sanity check before you spend money on user testing. It's unglamorous but still standard practice across the industry.

With AI tools promising instant feedback, it's easy to skip the boring stuff. NN/g's usability heuristics — visibility of system status, error prevention, recognition over recall, and the rest — are still the fastest way to catch obvious problems before you burn a research budget on them. This isn't a new framework, which is exactly why it's reliable: it's been stress-tested across thousands of products for over 25 years. For a junior designer, running a heuristic pass on your own work before a design review is a cheap way to look sharper in critique and catch issues a stakeholder would otherwise flag first.

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Content-first design is back on the agenda

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Redesigning workflows beats bolting on AI

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How Atlassian actually builds AI into design workflows

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