Evaluating Developers’ Knowledge of Usability Guidelines: An Empirical Study on Stack Overflow

Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics, established nearly three decades ago, continue to be taught as foundational principles in software development. However, it remains unclear whether these heuristics effectively address modern usability challenges and to what extent developers actively apply them. We analyzed 894 Stack Overflow posts to evaluate the effectiveness of these heuristics in identifying modern usability issues and examining developers’ explicit use of formal guidelines. Our analysis revealed that while Nielsen’s heuristics successfully categorized 75.1% of usability discussions, only 2.8% of posts explicitly referenced any usability guidelines, with platform-specific guidelines being more common than theoretical frameworks. In contrast, a comparative analysis with accessibility discussions showed 27.4% explicitly referenced standards like WCAG and ARIA. This stark disparity suggests that while Nielsen’s heuristics remain conceptually relevant for understanding usability issues, a significant gap exists between theoretical frameworks and practical developer discourse, with developers tending to gravitate toward technology-specific rather than theoretical guidance.