CARMEL UX Guidelines

The CARMEL guidelines are loosely inspired by Nielsen’s usability heuristics, but incorporate knowledge and standards that have emerged since Nielsen’s principles were published over 20 years ago, including best practices for accessibility.

CARMEL Guidelines:

Consistency: Follow existing standards, design patterns, and style guides.

Accessibility: Make content universally accessible to users of varying abilities.

Recovery: Design for error prevention and recovery.

Memory:  Support the limitations of human memory and cognition.

Efficiency: Maximize task efficiency and information findability.

Language: Tailor terminology to the user’s expertise and reading level.

Each guideline has been operationalized to include 5 key criteria for a multi-faceted evaluation:

CARMEL Criteria

Using CARMEL

• CARMEL Scorecard
  Use the interactive Scorecard to evaluate a design’s overall user experience and generate a usability score for each of the 6 guidelines. The scorecard can also be used as a learning tool.
• Capian UX Review Tool
  Use CARMEL with Capian to generate a page-by-page usability expert review.
• CARMEL Premium
  Contact us for a comprehensive review of your website or application using the CARMEL framework.