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Detailed Usability Heuristics: A Breakdown of Usability Heuristics to Enhance Comprehension for Novice Evaluators

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HCI International 2020 - Late Breaking Papers: User Experience Design and Case Studies (HCII 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12423))

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Abstract

Heuristic evaluation (HE) is one of the most commonly used usability evaluation methods. In HE, 3–5 evaluators evaluate a certain system guided by a list of usability heuristics with the goal of detecting usability issues. Although HE is popular in the usability field, it heavily depends on the expertise of the evaluator, meaning that there is a large gap in HE performance between expert evaluators and novice evaluators. One of the factors contributing to this gap is the difficulty of thoroughly understanding usability heuristics. Usability heuristics are abstract and require simplification to be better understood by novice evaluators. In this work, our goal was to simplify Nielsen’s heuristics to make them easier to understand since they are one of the most popular sets of usability heuristics. We interviewed 15 usability experts with at least 4 years of experience in the field from both academia and industry and asked them to explain Nielsen’s heuristics in detail. We analyzed their responses, and we produced a modified list that is more detailed than Nielsen’s original list.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing and Digital Media, DePaul University, 243 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60604, USA

    Anas Abulfaraj & Adam Steele

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  1. Anas Abulfaraj
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  2. Adam Steele
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Correspondence to Anas Abulfaraj .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Crete and Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Crete, Greece

    Constantine Stephanidis

  2. Aaron Marcus and Associates, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Aaron Marcus

  3. World Usability Day and Bentley User Experience Center, Newton Center, MA, USA

    Elizabeth Rosenzweig

  4. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Pei-Luen Patrick Rau

  5. San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, USA

    Abbas Moallem

  6. Eindhoven Univesity of Technology, Eindhoven, Noord-Brabant, The Netherlands

    Matthias Rauterberg

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Abulfaraj, A., Steele, A. (2020). Detailed Usability Heuristics: A Breakdown of Usability Heuristics to Enhance Comprehension for Novice Evaluators. In: Stephanidis, C., Marcus, A., Rosenzweig, E., Rau, PL.P., Moallem, A., Rauterberg, M. (eds) HCI International 2020 - Late Breaking Papers: User Experience Design and Case Studies. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12423. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60114-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60114-0_1

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