Abstract:
Mobile computing presents formidable challenges not only to
the design of applications but also to each and every phase
of the systems lifecycle. In particular, the HCI community
is still struggling with the challenges that mobile computing
poses to evaluation. Expert-based evaluation techniques are
well known and they do enable a relatively quick and easy
evaluation. Heuristic evaluation, in particular, has been
widely applied and investigated, most likely due to its ef-
ficiency in detecting most of usability flaws at front of a
rather limited investment of time and human resources in
the evaluation. However, the capacity of expert-based tech-
niques to capture contextual factors in mobile computing
is a major concern. In this paper, we report an effort for
realizing usability heuristics appropriate for mobile comput-
ing. The effort intends to capture contextual requirements
while still drawing from the inexpensive and flexible nature
of heuristic-based techniques. This work has been carried
out in the context of a research project task geared toward
developing a heuristic-based evaluation methodology for mo-
bile computing. This paper describes the methodology that
we adopted toward realizing mobile heuristics. It also re-
ports a study that we carried out in order to assess the rel-
evance of the realized mobile heuristics by comparing their
performance with that of the standard/traditional usability
heuristics. The study yielded positive results in terms of the
number of usability flaws identified and the severity ranking
assigned.
