Ger Joyce

Towards the Development of Usability Heuristics for Native Smartphone Mobile Applications

This paper reports on initial work in the identification of heuristics that may be most usefully applied in the heuristic evaluation of native smartphone applications. Given the prevalence of such applications, this work seems pertinent, particularly as it also seems under-represented in the literature. Once defined, the heuristics were developed further based on the quantitative and qualitative feedback received from sixty Human-Computer Interaction experts in eighteen countries. The resulting heuristics could be beneficial to HCI researchers and educators, and could also potentially expedite and cut the cost of smartphone application usability evaluations for HCI practitioners.

Information Security Application Design: Understanding Your Users

The basis of Human-Centered Design is the understanding of users’ goals and needs. One way to empathize with users is to create Personas. Yet, traditional methods of creating Personas are time-consuming. In this work, members of the Rapid7 User Experience team illustrate how they have quickly created Personas using the Proto-Persona method. The method, which encapsulates a collective set of beliefs that an organization has about their users, enabled our organization to capture stories of 80 characters. Refining these during the process, resulted in 16 Proto-Personas, which were visualized within a Persona Ecosystem. This Ecosystem, and the Personas within, has allowed Rapid7 to design the right Information Security applications for the right users at the right time.

Smartphone Application Usability Evaluation: The Applicability of Traditional Heuristics

The Heuristic Evaluation method has been popular with HCI experts for over 20 years. Yet, we believe that the set of heuristics defined by Nielsen in 1994 needs to be modified prior to the usability evaluation of smartphone applications. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of each of Nielsens traditional heuristics to the usability evaluation of smartphone applications following an analysis of 105 peer-reviewed papers. It is anticipated that this work might benefit HCI practitioners, educators and researchers as they attempt to define usability heuristics for smartphone applications. This set of heuristics, once defined, could enable the discovery of usability issues early in the smartphone application development life cycle, while continuing to be a discount usability engineering method as originally defined by Nielsen.

Mobile Application Usability: Heuristic Evaluation and Evaluation of Heuristics

Many traditional usability evaluation methods do not consider mobile-specific issues. This can result in mobile applications that abound in usability issues. We empirically evaluate three sets of usability heuristics for use with mobile applications, including a set defined by the authors. While the set of heuristics defined by the authors surface more usability issues in a mobile application than other sets of heuristics, improvements to the set can be made.

Addressing Mobile Usability and Elderly Users: Validating Contextualized Heuristics

Diverse heuristic sets were proposed in order to evolve Heuristic Evaluation for new contexts, as contexts related to the elderly and mobile devices. However, heuristics for evaluation of mobile usability regarding elderly users still need aditional validations. For this reason, our study aimed to enhance the validation of a heuristic set proposed by Al-Razgan et al. for evaluation of mobile usability regarding elderly users. Results showed that the major part of heuristics proposed by Al-Razgan et al. matches with traditional heuristics of Nielsen, while a few remain valuable for evaluations in this context. Also, after validations, we found evidences that the heuristics of Al-Razgan et al. have a great coverage of usability problems of mobile applications used by the elderly, as detected from test with users.

Mobile Application Tutorials: Perception of Usefulness from an HCI Expert Perspective

Mobile application tutorials are an opportunity to educate users about a mobile application. Should a mobile application tutorial not be used, the number of frustrated users and uninstalled applications could increase, resulting in a substantial loss in revenue for mobile application developers. Yet, the historical ineffectiveness of printed documentation and online help may have a negative influence on the perception of usefulness of mobile application tutorials for more experienced HCI experts. This in turn may influence their design decisions, whereby they may choose to not design a mobile application tutorial when it may have been better for the user. Our research suggests that while there is a split in the perception of usefulness of mobile application tutorials within the HCI community, the length of time in an HCI role did not have a statistically significant effect on this perception.

Utilizing Chatbots to Increase the Efficacy of Information Security Practitioners

Almost every day, the world hears about a new information security breach. In many cases, this is due to the vast quantity of data generated across millions of connected devices with little insight, and the amount of work that information security practitioners must do to make sense of it all. The lack of skilled information security resources doesn’t help. Different approaches are being attempted to fix these issues. However, many approaches are neither cost-effective nor scalable. One potential approach, which is both cost-effective and scalable, is the utilization of chatbots. In this paper, the authors focus on ways in which chatbots can assist information security practitioners, such as security analysts and pentesters, beyond the current human-before-support philosophy. Scenarios include investigations of potentially malicious behavior and team pentest projects, each of which explores how a chatbot might allow the relevant type of information security practitioner to be far more effective and efficient.

Evaluating the impact of changing contexts on mobile application usability within agile environments

Mobile applications tend to be used in contexts that change over time. These varying contexts may impact the usability, and potentially the overall user experience, of mobile applications. However, the impact of context from a temporal perspective is not fully considered within usability evaluations. Consequently, this work focuses on a conceptual method that attempts to address this limitation. The proposed Contextual Usability Evaluation method promises to allow Human-Computer Interaction experts to evaluate the perceived impact of varying contexts over time on the usability of mobile applications. Despite the focus on context over time, the method is well suited to fast-paced Agile environments.

Adapting Heuristics for the Mobile Panorama

Expert-based usability inspection methods are well established; the heuristic method in particular is widely known for being fast, relatively inexpensive and easy to learn. However, traditional heuristics are not easily applied to the mobile panorama. This paper is concerned with preliminary work in the design of a set of heuristics that are tailored to the evaluation of native smartphone applications. In this work, Nielsens original set of heuristics as well as research in the field of usability evaluation for mobile computing were analysed and used to derive a set of heuristics for the evaluation of native smartphone applications.

Heuristic Evaluation for Mobile Applications: Extending a Map of the Literature

Ensuring that mobile applications are as usable as possible is an important area of Human-Computer Interaction research. Part of that research effort is to consider how traditional, tried-and-tested usability evaluation approaches might be applied to newer technologies, including mobile applications. The contribution of this work is to further the work of other researchers by discovering if heuristic evaluation is commonly applied to mobile applications by Human-Computer Interaction practitioners. Additionally, the authors empirically test the suggestion that Nielsen’s heuristics may be generic enough for the usability evaluation of mobile applications.