Usability issues in hardware products often surface late in development when they are costly to fix. This piece adapts Jakob Nielsen's ten usability heuristics to embedded hardware contexts — covering physical controls (buttons, LEDs, haptics), firmware state machines, and constrained displays — using a smartwatch as a running example. It proposes a structured 'Quickfire' evaluation session (roughly 60 minutes) modeled after FMEA, with specific questions for each heuristic and guidance on where to apply the framework across the hardware development lifecycle (architecture, industrial design, EVT, DVT). The approach is positioned as a complement to formal user testing, not a replacement, aimed at catching interaction problems before they become expensive to change.
