Establishing usability heuristics for heuristics evaluation in a specific domain: Is there a consensus?

Abstract

Heuristics evaluation is frequently employed to evaluate usability. While general heuristics are generally suitable to evaluate most user interfaces, there is still the need to establish heuristics for specific domains to ensure that usability issues that are specific to the domains are identified. This paper presented a comprehensive review of 70 studies related to usability heuristics for specific domains. The aim of this paper is to review the processes that were applied to establish heuristics in specific domains and identify gaps in order to provide recommendations for future research and area of improvements. The most urgent issue found is the deficiency of validation effort following heuristics proposition and the lack of robustness and rigour of validation method adopted. There is an early indication that heuristics for specific domains are generally capable of identifying more issues than general heuristics. However, due to lack of validation quality and clarity on how to assess their effectiveness, it is not yet clear to what extent their advantages are. The lack of validation quality also affects effort in improving existing heuristics for specific domain as their weaknesses are not addressed.

PROMETHEUS: Procedural Methodology For Developing Heuristics Of Usability

“…PROMETHEUS is a PROcedural METhodology for developing HEuristics of USability proposed to increase the robustness of investigations that aim to develop new domainspecific usability heuristics. Based on Hermawati y Lawson's study [8], and using the R3C methodology as a base [9], we propose a process consisting in 7 principal stages, and a continuous refinement cycle. The main contributions of PROMETHEUS ' are: (i) it specifies each artifact consumed or generated in detail for each stage, (ii) it defines quantitative quality indicators, and (iii) it defines the refinement based on feedback provided by the indicators.…”

“…The first point to emphasize is that most of the studies analyzed in [8] include two large stages: collecting information on heuristics, and transforming that information into domain heuristics. Hermawati and Lawson describe 4 strategies for collecting information: 1) Adopt existing theories.…”

Método para la evaluación de la Usabilidad del Software del Voto Electrónico Presencial – UsabVEP

“…En el trabajo de [5] se evaluaron más de 70 estudios relacionados con heurísticas de usabilidad y se observó que más del 50% usaron, adaptaron o extendieron las heurísticas propuestas por Nielsen.…”

“…El método UsabVEP se comparó con el método de Jakob Nielsen [5] [12] por ser el más representativo en evaluaciones de usabilidad, se compararon el total de problemas encontrados aplicando las heurísticas de cada método. El resultado mostrado en la figura 5, se observa que el método propuesto encontró más problemas que el de Nielsen, asimismo se observa que seis problemas fueron hallados solamente con el método UsabVEP, y no pudieron ser hallados mediante el método de Nielsen.…”

“…La falta o incumplimiento de alguna heurística se estaría ante un problema de usabilidad. De acuerdo con [5] se deben elaborar heurísticas relacionadas al problema en estudio con el fin de encontrar de manera pertinente los problemas de usabilidad del software. En el presente trabajo se establecen los heurísticos apropiados para software de voto electrónico.…”