Set of Usability Heuristics for Quality Assessment of Mobile Applications on Smartphones

Abstract

The innovations proposed by the cell phone market have grown steadily in recent years, along with the increasing complexity of the hardware, operating systems, and applications available in this market. These changes bring new challenges related to usability that need to be considered during the development process of these applications since the new forms of user-application interactions increasingly require adapting the behavior of smartphone users. In this situation, usability is an important issue that depends on factors such as the Users, their characteristics and abilities, the Task which the users intend to achieve and also the application usage Context. This work presents a systematic literature review with the objective of identifying the heuristics and usability metrics used in the literature and/or industry. Based on the review results, this work presents another contribution with a proposal of a set of usability heuristics focused in mobile applications on smartphones, considering the User, Task and Context as usability factors and Cognitive Load as an important attribute of usability. The components of this set are detailed in a model intended to be used in empirical validations allowing to dynamically incorporate improvements to the proposal.