Adapting Heuristics for Notification Systems

Notification systems are growing in use from home to the workplace. They are used to monitor stock prices, navigate in a vehicle, and to encourage collaboration at a job, among countless other applications. These systems must be developed and tested, but existing usability evaluation methods are not always useful. They fail to consider systems used in divided-attention tasks and the impact on primary tasks. Thus there is a need for usability evaluation methods that are adapted specifically for notification systems. Being able to find more usability problems with the adapted methods than the existing methods will aid in not only evaluations, but iterative design as well. Since there has already been much work on developing usability evaluation methods, those can be used as a basis for creating methods to work with notification systems. Since heuristic evaluation is a popular method with low cost, it is a good choice for adaptation. So a new set of heuristics for notification systems is created and tested against a standard set of heuristics. Applying these adapted heuristics against a standard set resulted in the adapted method performing slightly better than the standard method. They showed promise in identifying valid usability problems along with applying directly to notification systems.