A Revised Set of Usability Heuristics for the Evaluation of Interactive Systems

Abstract

Usability is a critical quality attribute in the information society. Inspection based evaluation re-lies on various forms of design knowledge that are used to assess the usability, such as ergonomic criteria, heuristics, and guidelines. Usability heuristics are widely recognized principles against which the usability of an interactive system could be evaluated. This work presents a revised set of usability heuristics that are based on the experience acquired in previous studies targeting local e-government websites. The underlying goal is to include the most important er-gonomic criteria and usability heuristics into a clear hierarchical organization, which helps evaluators to better explain and developers to better understand the usability problems. The new set has only fourteen heuristics that are structured into four groups: user guidance, user effort, user control and freedom, and user support. The main strength of this approach is the good coverage achieved with a reduced number of heuristics.

Keywords

• Usability Evaluation
• Usability Heuristics
• Ergonomic Criteria
• Usability Inspection