Heuristic-based usability evaluation tool for android applications

Abstract

Heuristic evaluation is a popular method for evaluating usability of user interface due to its simplicity and cost efficiency compared to other methods. Evaluation is done by evaluators by inspecting user interface on each screen of an application against usability design principles or heuristics. The evaluation depends on judgment and experience of the evaluators whether they can spot the problems, and there are many heuristics to check against. This paper attempts to assist the evaluators by automating the evaluation task against a number of design heuristics. The paper presents a development of a usability evaluation tool for Android applications by inspecting source code and reporting locations in the code where violations of heuristics are found. Although only small part of the heuristics can be checked automatically, an experiment shows that the tool can help save evaluation time and can discover usability problems that are missed by evaluators.