Development of Heuristics to Assess Enterprise AR Experience Design and Usability

Usability heuristics are lists of design guidelines that developers and practitioners can use to evaluate the usability of applications in the design and development process. A heuristic evaluation is an activity conducted by a usability expert that involves a checklist of best practices. Applications are judged on their adherence to the checklist items, and the results are used to refine the application design so that it better meets the end user’s needs.

While there are several general usability heuristics available for software interfaces (e.g., Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design, Schneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design), there have been no heuristic checklists developed specifically to assess AR experiences for the workplace. Using a heuristic checklist targeted to enterprise AR reveals aspects beyond the general best practices that are unique to AR environments. This includes characteristics such as safety, comfort, user interaction methods, hardware setup and capabilities, and privacy.

This research topic involves the development of a new heuristic checklist for enterprise AR experience developers and practitioners to use to evaluate the usability of AR experiences and accompanying hardware.

Stakeholders

Developers, users, operators, users of AR applications

Possible Methodologies

Quiñones, Rusu, & Rusu (2018) outline a formal methodology for developing usability/user experience heuristics. The method has been applied in a number of domains outside of enterprise AR and validated by experts. This method involves a systematic literature review, examination of the experimental literature, detailed analyses of the characteristics heuristics should have in the domain, and three levels of validation.

Research Program

This topic is academic in nature though the resulting heuristic checklist should be validated with many AREA stakeholders in a variety of domains and industries to ensure robustness and generalized usefulness among the wide range of AR applications used in enterprise settings.

Miscellaneous Notes

Details on how to develop a new set of heuristics for a domain are discussed in work by Quiñones, Rusu, & Rusu (2018) in this article.

Keywords

Usability, user experience, heuristics, best practices, product design, software design, user centered design, design, hci design and evaluation methods

Research Agenda Categories

End-User and User Experience, Industries, Technology

Expected Impact Timeframe

Medium

Related Publications

Using the words in this topic description and Natural Language Processing analysis of publications in the AREA FindAR database, the references below have the highest number of matches with this topic:

• Derby, J. L., & Chaparro, B. S. (2020). Use of Augmented Reality by Older Adults. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 125-134.
• Tuli, N., & Mantri, A. (2020). Usability Principles for Augmented Reality based Kindergarten Applications. Procedia Computer Science, 172, 679-687.
• Wiegand, G., Mai, C., Holländer, K., & Hussmann, H. (2019). InCarAR. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications.
• Masmuzidin, M. Z., & Aziz, N. A. (2019). The Adaptation of Shneiderman’s Golden Rules and Nielsen’s Heuristics on Motivational Augmented Reality Technology Design for Young Children. 2019 IEEE 9th International Conference on System Engineering and Technology (ICSET).

More publications can be explored using the AREA FindAR research tool.

Author

ERAU Team

Last Published (yyyy-mm-dd)

2021-08-31

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