The paper proposes an approach to comparative usability evaluation that incorporates important relevant criteria identified in previous work. It applies the proposed approach to a case study of a comparative evaluation of an academic website employing four widely-used usability evaluation methods (UEMs): heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthroughs, think-aloud protocol and co-discovery learning.

Cost–benefit analysis Although usability’s broad benefits are impressive, a cost-benefit analysis might be a necessary first step in introducing usability into your organization or a particular project. In usability cost-benefit analyses, the goal is to estimate the costs and benefits of specific usability activities—such as prototyping, usability testing, heuristic evaluation, and so on—and co...

In recent years, many video game researchers have developed domain specific heuristics for video games. Heuristic evaluation is a common way to measure software usability, both during development and to assess existing systems. Video games are very different from productivity software in terms of purpose, design and execution, and thus require specially developed heuristics. Heuristics develope...

This paper presents DEPTH (usability evaluation based on DEsign PaTterns & Heuristics criteria) a methodology for performing scenario-based heuristic usability evaluation of Web sites. It is comprised of two operational phases, the preparatory and the execution phase, where specific steps are performed for evaluating the usability along three axis: usability comparison tests among similar Web s...

Deeper searches in game-playing programs relying on the minimax principle generally produce better results. Theoretical analyses, however, suggest that in many cases minimaxing amplifies the noise introduced by the heuristic function used to evaluate the leaves of the game tree, leading to what is known as pathological behavior, where deeper searches produce worse results. In most minimax model...

Research in the domain of examination timetabling is moving towards developing methods that generalise well over a range of problems. This is achieved by implementing hyper-heuristic systems to find the best heuristic or heuristic combination to allocate examinations when constructing a timetable for a problem. Heuristic combinations usually take the form of a list of low-level heuristics that ...

Mobile health platforms offer significant opportunities for improving diabetic self-care, but only if adequate usability exists. Expert evaluations such as heuristic evaluation can provide distinct usability information about systems. The purpose of this study was to complete a usability evaluation of a mobile health system for diabetes patients using a modified heuristic evaluation technique o...

Among usability inspection methods, heuristic evaluation, or expert evaluation, is considered the most used and well-known usability evaluation method. The number of evaluators and their expertise are essential aspects that affect the quality of the evaluation, the cost that its application generates, and the time that it is necessary to spend. This paper presents a dynamic simulation model to ...

Heuristic search effectiveness depends directly upon the quality of heuristic evaluations of states in a search space. Given the large amount of research effort devoted to computer chess throughout the past half-century, insufficient attention has been paid to the issue of determining if a proposed change to an evaluation function is beneficial. We argue that the mapping of an evaluation functi...