Experimental case study of new usability heuristics

Abstract

A widely used method to measure the level of usability of software applications is the heuristic evaluation. In this method, specialists commonly use the Nielsen’s heuristics to assess the usability of a software product. However, these principles address to general aspects and become inappropriate when they are used to evaluate new categories of software applications. For this reason, we previously proposed a new set of usability heuristics in the Web transactional domain. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of our new proposal. For this purpose, fifteen undergraduate students were asked to perform a heuristic evaluation in which the new set of heuristics were employed. A survey was taken in order to capture their perceptions about the heuristics in four dimensions: ease of use, usefulness, intention to use and completeness. The results showed that the new heuristics meet the expectations. In addition, this analysis was compared with the results of a similar study that was performed to the current proposal of Nielsen. The results from this study have allowed to reach promising results in this area.