Set Of Usability Heuristics Research Articles

Identification of Usability Issues of Interactive Technologies in Cultural Heritage through Heuristic Evaluations and Usability Surveys

Usability is a principal aspect of the system development process to improve and augment system facilities and meet users’ needs and necessities in all domains. It is no exception for cultural heritage. Usability problems of the interactive technology practice in cultural heritage museums should be recognized thoroughly from the viewpoints of experts and users. This paper reports on a two-phase empirical study to identify the usability problems in audio guides and websites of cultural heritage museums in Vietnam, as a developing country, and Australia, as a developed country. In phase one, five-user experience experts identified usability problems using the set of usability heuristics, and proposed suggestions to mitigate these issues. Ten usability heuristics identified a total of 176 problems for audio guides and websites. In phase two, we conducted field usability surveys to collect the real users’ opinions to detect the usability issues and examine the negative-ranked usability. The outstanding issues for audio guides and websites were pointed out. Identification of relevant usability issues and users’ and experts’ suggestions for these technologies should be given immediate attention to helping organizations and interactive service providers improve technologies’ adoptions. The paper’s findings are reliable inputs for our future study about the preeminent UX framework for interactive technology in the CH domain.

Heurísticas de Usabilidade para Aplicativos Móveis Educacionais Infantis

O mercado de aplicativos móveis educacionais apresenta uma gama diversificada de opções destinadas à satisfação de diversos públicos, sobretudo o infantil. Todavia, parte considerável desses aplicativos abrange diversas idades e desconsidera características intrínsecas à educação infantil, em que crianças têm necessidades de interação diferenciadas e necessidades educacionais específicas. No campo dos estudos de informática na educação, encontrou-se apenas um conjunto de heurísticas de usabilidade para aplicativos móveis educacionais (heurísticas genéricas); todavia, essas heurísticas não consideram aspectos específicos da educação infantil. Nesse sentido, este artigo apresenta os resultados de uma pesquisa em que foi desenvolvido e avaliado um conjunto de heurísticas de usabilidade para aplicativos móveis educacionais específicos para o domínio infantil. As novas heurísticas foram avaliadas por professores e pesquisadores da Educação Infantil, especialistas em Interação Humano-Computador e pesquisadores em Informática na Educação. Além disso, a eficácia e a eficiência dessas novas heurísticas foram avaliadas em relação às heurísticas genéricas, por meio de um experimento no qual identificou-se o grau de cobertura das novas heurísticas, as quais se mostraram mais adequadas para avaliação de aplicativos móveis educacionais quando no domínio infantil.

A Set of Usability Heuristics and Design Recommendations for Higher Education Institutions' Websites

Usability evaluation of a website is a key element in identifying the areas where the end-users might experience problems while interacting with it. The usability parameter has a great impact on the performance of a website, an organization's image, user satisfaction, and their intention to revisit the site. In the recent past, there has been a tremendous increase in the use of websites for seeking requisite information about admission to various courses offered by higher education institutions. There has been a lack of an effective and efficient set of heuristics that can be used to evaluate the usability of these education institution websites. The present study differs from earlier studies by providing a new set of 43 usability heuristics and categorizing them into eight distinct factors on the basis of their empirical validation. These eight identified factors exhibit strong psychometric properties and are ease of navigation, design quality, information architecture, credibility, functionality quality, content quality, simplicity, and learnability. The findings of this study are highly useful for the website designers and evaluators of higher education institutions' websites, who are concerned with evaluating and improving the usability of these websites. The findings of this study have theoretical as well as practical implications.

Game for aNy heuristic evaluation (G4NHE): a generalization of the G4H gamification considering different sets of usability heuristics

Many initiatives have promoted collaborative heuristic evaluation to avoid discrepancies between evaluator’s ratings. This paper presents G4NHE (Game for aNy heuristic evaluation), a card game proposed to increase the engagement of different evaluators in an evaluation process based on heuristic evaluation. G4NHE is a generalization of previous work (the G4H gamification) to be applied to different usability heuristics. G4H was designed to support Nielsen’s heuristics only. The main goal of G4NHE is to provide an engaging and ludic way to consolidate collaborative heuristic evaluation. It can also be used by students and professionals to coordinate the tasks of heuristic evaluations. Several usability heuristics were analyzed to identify the common characteristics and how these characteristics demand changes in the rules of original G4H generic gamification named G4NHE. G4NHE can be used as complementary material to HCI courses. This paper presents the steps used to create G4NHE and a guide to enable any HCI professional or student to use G4NHE gamification with any usability heuristic. As a result, this work enables gamification non-specialists to create a gamification based on G4H (a gamification built for Nielsen’s heuristics) to any usability heuristic. G4NHE still needs to be fully evaluated, but the expectations are that it can take advantage of the engagement, ludic teaching, and participation satisfaction already present in G4H by using any usability heuristic.

Heuristic Evaluation: Comparing Generic and Specific Usability Heuristics for Identification of Usability Problems in a Living Museum Mobile Guide App

This paper reports on an empirical study that compares two sets of heuristics, Nielsen’s heuristics and the SMART heuristics in the identification of usability problems in a mobile guide smartphone app for a living museum. Five experts used the severity rating scales to identify and determine the severity of the usability issues based on the two sets of usability heuristics. The study found that Nielsen’s heuristics set is too general to detect usability problems in a mobile application compared to SMART heuristics which focuses on the smartphone application in the product development lifecycle instead of the generic Nielsen’s heuristics which focuses on a wide range of interactive system. The study highlights the importance of utilizing domain specific usability heuristics in the evaluation process. This ensures that relevant usability issues were successfully identified which could then be given immediate attention to ensure optimal user experience.

Developing Usability Heuristics: A Formal or Informal Process?

There are many methods to assess the usability of interactive software systems. The Heuristic evaluation is one of the methods that allow finding many usability issues, based on a set of usability principles (heuristics). However, sets of generic usability heuristics may miss domain ‑ related usability aspects. Particularly, transactional web sites have specific features which could potentially not be considered when using generic heuristics. We developed a set of usability heuristics for transactional websites, using the methodology proposed by Rusu et al. (2011). The set of heuristics was designed, validated and refined during three iterations; experimental validation indicates that it is an effective and efficient evaluation instrument. The methodology facilitated the heuristics' design and specification. However, certain deficiencies were detected when applying it, so further improvements are necessary.

A unified methodology for the evaluation of accessibility and usability of mobile applications

This article reports a unified methodology developed to evaluate the accessibility and usability of mobile computing applications, which is intended to guarantee universal access as far as possible. As a basis for the methodology, this paper presents an analysis of the accessibility guidelines, conducted to take into account the specificity of mobile systems, as well as a set of usability heuristics, specifically devised for mobile computing. Finally, it presents the results of the application of the proposed methodology to applications that have been semi-automatically developed by the MAIS Designer, a new design tool that provides applications suited to different mobile devices.

Usability in the Lab: Techniques for Creating Usable Products

Laboratory automation and instrumentation vendors frequently claim usability among their long lists of features and benefits—but can they justify that claim? What makes a product usable and how do you design for usability? This article outlines an approach used to create usable products in other application areas, such as eCommerce and medical device development, and suggests that a similar approach could provide benefits for users and developers alike in the field of laboratory automation. The user-centered design process is summarized, together with a set of usability heuristics that can be applied during the design process and used to evaluate usability during development.