It professional preferences to evaluate systems usability

Abstract

The competitive software development market is making its users increasingly demanding quality of use of such software. Alongside this, there are few software development companies investing in usability tests, because they don’t have experts in usability. As a contribution of this work, there is a methodology that has two directions in which the heuristic evaluation can be applied: by functionality of the application, in which the appropriate heuristics are applied in the user interfaces that show this functionality; or by heuristic being passed in all user interfaces. Results of a qualitative analysis showed evidences that it is possible that any professional, not being an expert in usability, may perform heuristic evaluation. Following this proposal, we hope that the companies that develop software can perform heuristic evaluation, using their own developers.