Evaluating Software for Affective Education: A Case Study of Affective Heuristics

This paper addresses the use of a proposed heuristic method to evaluate affect in the user interface, educational design, and content of educational multimodal software system. A case study is presented where this method is used to evaluate a Museum Explorer system. This system was designed to support an educational objective of making the users more engaged and reflective, by supporting the use narrative to help the users tell a visual story. We recruited participants to apply the evaluation method to the Museum Explorer system. Our findings were that the evaluation method was effective, but we observed a number of effects that suggested necessary improvements. For example, the emphasis in the method had to be changed to avoid a focus on simple usability issues. Moreover, we found that the evaluators had to be clear on the affective teaching objectives and on how the software design was intended to support them. We conclude with a revised set of heuristics based on these findings.