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

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.