Integrating Fitts’ law in heuristical evalution checklist

Abstract

The Learner Centered Design (LCD) guarantees efficiency, effectiveness and customer satisfaction avoiding that the learning environment becomes frustrating and offering quality to the IT support together with low cost evaluation parameters. In the academic and industrial environments the heuristic analysis based upon checklist is a diffused method to analyze the LCD adequacy to the quality criteria. The usability of the interfaces has a relevant role. Fitts’ law is a model of the human behavior of the prediction of the times for the pointing of a target. It can be used for the design of usable interfaces, as well. In literature, the empirical evidence shows the effectiveness of Fitts’ law in the interactions between humans and control equipment for the military and aeronautics field. Nevertheless there are still few experiments in web usability. In this paper we present an experiment which shows a significant improvement of the indices used to measure usability. The advantages of the integration of Fitts’ law within the heuristic based upon checklist will be analyzed after an adequate presentation of the literature. A usability test on two samples of users of the Jonian Department at the University of Bari will be adopted.

Keywords

• Learning Management Systems
• Technology enhanced learning