6.4 CONCLUSION Don't confuse heuristics with standards. Standards give designers rules to fol- low, which speeds design time and reduces emergence of usability problems. With standards, you have a highly specific set of rules that the designers in your com- pany follow to maintain consistency in order to improve intuitiveness. Those rules are set up with usability in mind as well, so that by following them, designers can help to reduce usability problems. In contrast, heuristics are guidelines for evalua- tion. They're not really geared for design. It's okay for designers to see heuristics in order to help them understand what to watch out for, but heuristics and standards are fundamentally very different. 6.3.4 Choosing and Developing Your Own Heuristics Let me preface this by saying that you shouldn't stay up late at night worrying over exactly what heuristics you use. The heuristics matter, but they're just one piece of the puzzle. And just because you don't have a heuristic that points to a usability problem doesn't mean that an evaluator can't see the problem and take note of it. I recommend starting with one of the published lists of heuristics and improv- ing it. There is currently no definitive list, but I'd say to start with either the HEP (Desurvire, Caplan, & Toth, 2004) or the Nokia list (Korhonen and Koivisto 2006) if