Heuristic Evaluation on Mobile Interfaces: A New Checklist

Abstract

The rapid evolution and adoption of mobile devices raise new usability challenges, given their limitations (in screen size, battery life, etc.) as well as the specific requirements of this new interaction. Traditional evaluation techniques need to be adapted in order for these requirements to be met. Heuristic evaluation (HE), an Inspection Method based on evaluation conducted by experts over a real system or prototype, is based on checklists which are desktop-centred and do not adequately detect mobile-specific usability issues. In this paper, we propose a compilation of heuristic evaluation checklists taken from the existing bibliography but readapted to new mobile interfaces. Selecting and rearranging these heuristic guidelines offer a tool which works well not just for evaluation but also as a best-practices checklist. The result is a comprehensive checklist which is experimentally evaluated as a design tool. This experimental evaluation involved two software engineers without any specific knowledge about usability, a group of ten users who compared the usability of a first prototype designed without our heuristics, and a second one after applying the proposed checklist. The results of this experiment show the usefulness of the proposed checklist for avoiding usability gaps even with nontrained developers.

App Chronic Disease Checklist: Protocol to Evaluate Mobile Apps for Chronic Disease Self-Management

“…In total, 6 peer-reviewed checklists focusing on usability of health apps were identified [5,15,16,29-31], as presented in Table 1. The MARS comprises 4 dimensions, totaling 19 items, with another subjective quality and app-specific category of 10 items [16].…”

“…Heuristic evaluation has been applied successfully in the development of a number of health apps, such as headache diaries [5] and healthy eating apps [39], to guide design features such as the maximum number of items to maintain comprehensiveness, specificity, and efficiency. Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics [29] were the foundation of several mobile app usability studies [5,28,31], and were applied here. The checklist was designed to enable rating by assessors, as per another Australian health app study [16].…”

A usability design checklist for Mobile electronic data capturing forms: the validation process

“…2016, Gomez et al 2014, Omar et al 2016, Nielsen 2001b, Pierotti 1995, Budiu and Nielsen 2011, of Health and Services nd, Parham 2013, Nielsen 2001a, Nayebi et al 2013), the majority of which came from a system checklist by Pierotti [13]. Other sub heuristics were also derived from the ERP checklist, one of the latest mobile based checklists and also an update of the usability heuristic checklist for mobile interfaces [14]. We therefore updated this checklist by removing some evaluation questions that are specific to mobile ERP and were then left with 125 usability evaluation questions.…”

SmartHeart CABG Edu

“…Two evaluators were enrolled for the expert-based review: they used a new check list specifically designed to evaluate mobile interfaces, that reuses 69% of literature heuristics, the rest deriving from best-practices and recommendations for mobile interfaces (Gómez et al, 2014). Nevertheless, given that the app is a first prototype, the heuristics used for the evaluation were limited to only those actually applicable.…”