Abstract
Usability Heuristics are being widely used as a means of evaluating user interfaces. However, little existing work has been done that focused on assessing the effect of these heuristics individually or collectively on said systems. In this paper, the authors propose an approach to evaluating the usability of systems that deploys a prioritised version of Nielsen’s usability heuristics. Fuzzy cognitive maps were used to prioritise the original heuristics according to experts in both fields. Using either set of heuristics evaluators can identify the same number of usability issues. However, when trying to enhance the overall usability of a system, the prioritised set of heuristics can help stakeholders focus their limited resources on fixing the subset of issues that collectively has the worst effect on the usability of their systems during each iteration. To test the findings proposed by authors several websites were evaluated for various usability problems. The experimental results show that by using the proposed heuristics, evaluators were able to find a comparable number of problems to those who used Nielsen’s, the prioritised heuristics resulted in an ordered list of issues based on their effect on usability. Therefore, the authors believe that heuristic evaluation in general, and their introduced heuristics in particular, are effective in dealing with issues when facing situations of limited resources.
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Notes
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The algorithm consists of an enumeration defining the possible severity levels in fuzzy membership degrees, a for-loop that loops through usability issues; corresponding to one heuristic at a time and calculates the total severity of all problems. The final severity level of problems corresponding to a given heuristic is calculated as a weighted average w.r.t the total number of usability issues in the system as a whole.
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported by National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH) K108405, K124055.
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Amro, R.N., Dhama, S., Muhanna, M., Kóczy, L.T. (2018). Prioritisation of Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. In: Medina, J., et al. Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems. Theory and Foundations. IPMU 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 853. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91473-2_44
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