Heuristic evaluation of mobile usability: a mapping study

Abstract

The mobile devices market has grown substantially, along with significant developments in mobile interactive technologies. Devices such as tablets, smartphones and others have increasingly become more popular and helped improve the way people interact and exchange information. The aim of this paper is to perform a systematic mapping of the literature regarding the use of heuristic evaluation methods applied on mobile applications. The aims of this research were twofold: analysing what are the most used sets of usability heuristics on usability evaluations of mobile devices, providing a common base to improve mobile design and usability evaluation; analysing details of how usability inspections of mobile applications have been conducted. The results show that different heuristics have been reported in research papers to evaluate usability of mobile devices. The study identified a total of 9 different heuristics sets means of the literature mapping. The traditional set of heuristics proposed by Nielsen and Molich was still the most used set of heuristics in heuristic usability evaluations of mobile devices, but the proposal of new specific heuristics for mobile interfaces has grown substantially.