nielsen-usability-heuristics

nielsen-usability-heuristics is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from dembrandt/dembrandt-skills. It costs 55 tokens per session (1,943 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A checklist of ten established principles for making interfaces easier to understand and use, including showing system status, using familiar language, supporting undo, and preventing errors. These principles are commonly called Nielsen's usability heuristics.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review screens, interaction flows, error messages, loading states, forms, and navigation. It can guide design decisions from the start or structure a later usability audit.
Why use it?
It gives designers and developers a shared way to find usability problems before or after implementation. It helps reveal missing feedback, confusing wording, poor navigation, and avoidable user errors.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

not rated 54repo +2 2d ago A scan Socket: passSnyk: passSkillSpector: pass 55 tokens original MIT

Good fit Use it to review screens, interaction flows, error messages, loading states, forms, and navigation. It can guide design decisions from the start or structure a later usability audit.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/nielsen-usability-heuristics
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add dembrandt/dembrandt-skills --skill nielsen-usability-heuristics
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for nielsen-usability-heuristics

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/nielsen-usability-heuristics/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/nielsen-usability-heuristics)
Your own site
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Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for nielsen-usability-heuristics

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/nielsen-usability-heuristics"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/dembrandt/dembrandt-skills/nielsen-usability-heuristics.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 55 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,943 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 19 Apr 2026
  • Snyk pass 19 Apr 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00055 $0.01943
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00971
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00389
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00194

Measured 13d ago against content hash af8289afabcb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

nielsen-usability-heuristics scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 13d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/nielsen-usability-heuristics/SKILL.md · 227 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 227 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Nielsen's 10 Usability Heuristics

Foundational principles for evaluating and designing usable interfaces. Apply these as a review checklist and as design constraints from the start — not only as a post-hoc audit tool.


1. Visibility of System Status

The design should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within a reasonable amount of time.

Users cannot make good decisions without knowing the current state of the system. Trust is built through clear, timely feedback.

In practice:

  • Show loading states, progress indicators, and completion confirmations
  • Indicate where the user is in a multi-step process
  • Reflect state changes immediately (optimistic UI or loading spinners)
  • Never leave a user wondering whether an action was registered

Review question: After any user action, is the outcome visible within 1 second?


2. Match Between System and Real World

The design should speak the users' language — words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, not internal jargon or system terminology.

Follow real-world conventions and natural mapping so the interface feels intuitive rather than requiring translation.

In practice:

  • Use terminology the target audience uses, not what the engineering team uses
  • Icons should match real-world objects or widely established web conventions
  • Spatial metaphors should match real-world expectations (e.g. "trash" for deletion)
  • Avoid exposing internal system concepts (IDs, error codes, process names) to end users

Review question: Would a user unfamiliar with this product understand every label and term?


3. User Control and Freedom

Users often perform actions by mistake. They need a clearly marked emergency exit to leave an unwanted state without going through an extended process.

Easy undo and escape paths foster confidence and prevent users from feeling trapped.

In practice:

  • Always provide Undo for destructive or irreversible actions
  • Modals and dialogs need an obvious close/cancel action
  • Multi-step flows need a way to go back
  • Destructive actions (delete, publish, send) should be reversible where possible — or require explicit confirmation

Read the full file on GitHub · 227 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 13d ago First seen · 227 lines · 55 tokens per session scan A af8289afabcb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

nielsen-usability-heuristics is a skill published in the GitHub repository dembrandt/dembrandt-skills (54 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 55 tokens to every session and 1,943 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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