Combining common heuristic sets for a new exhaustive usability evaluation of e-learning interface design

Abstract

Abstract With global school shut-downs due to the pandemic, in 2020 many educational institutions and universities were making use of e-learning like never before, but designing lesson plans for a digital space came with its own set of challenges. In most modern universities, education is still based on traditional learning methods and the teacher-centred physical classrooms. However, with nationwide school closures, teachers had no choice but to turn to e-learning for solutions. Usability evaluation of this kind of platform, therefore, has become essential, and a priority in the application development process. A set of usability evaluation methods have been developed to allow specialists to systematically determine whether graphical interfaces are usable. The usability assessment questionnaire is one of the most used methods and is intended to be answered by end-users of the application. This method is preferred due to its simplicity and low demand for resources. In this paper, a usability evaluation which combines existing work is presented. Based on existing heuristics, we propose a new questionnaire for evaluating e-learning interface design. In addition, we illustrate two different methodologies for evaluating e-learning interface design, and provide a quantitative rate, Usability Percentage (UP), which complements the usual qualitative data provided by this kind of evaluation.