Or  ‘Jungian Psychology and Usability Heuristics’.

Proposition

In the same way as the human mind is split into the ‘conscious’, ‘personal subconscious’, and ‘collective unconscious’, user experience can be split into ‘user interface’, ‘user journeys’, and ‘heuristics’. This has a couple of implications:

• That heuristics are universal and therefore should not include site-specific elements, i.e. heuristics should exclude elements related to the user experience or the user journey.
• That a site can fall under a number of heuristic categories: for example, as a website, as an information site, as a search engine part of the site.

Types of Heuristic

So, instead of the traditional set of 10 heuristics, there would be a global heuristic for all websites, one for the type of website, and one for the type of page.

Types of Website

This is taken from ‘Designing Web Navigation’ by Kalbach

• Information sites
• E-commerce sites
• Corporate intranets
• Community sites
• Entertainment sites
• Learning sites
• Identity sites

Types of Content

These are a few off the top of my head

• Home pages
• Content pages
• Forms
• Search

Where Next

So, how would it be if instead of the traditional 10 heuristics, we could measure an individual page against:

• Universal web heuristics
• Site type heuristics
• Page type heuristics