Research for the evaluation of web-sites has already begun, however it is proceeding at a very slow rate. The main reasons for this are, in our opinion, the attempt to adapt existing methodologies to the particularities of the web, the individual structure of web-sites and the issue of finding the appropriate evaluators. This study copes exactly with these points and suggests a heuristic approa...

This paper presents a heuristic method for evaluating virtual environment (VE) user interfaces. The method is based on Nielsen’s [Usability Inspection Methods, 1994] usability heuristics, extended by VE-specific principles proposed by Sutcliffe and Kaur [Behaviour and Information Technology 19 (2000) 415–426]. Twelve heuristics are presented which address usability and presence issues. An inspe...

Nowadays, Web-based learning systems have become popular because they can provide multiple tools, among which hierarchical maps are widely used to support teaching and learning. However, traditional hierarchical maps may let learners easily get lost within large information space. This study proposes an animated hierarchical map to address this problem. To consider the effects of different inst...

Usability evaluation is a critical part in an application development process and currently there are many techniques which have been developed by HCI researchers in the usability evaluation of a system. One of the commonly used techniques in evaluating usability is Heuristic Evaluation (HE). In this research, the courseware had been evaluated based on HECW which contains 4 main heuristics; Int...

Despite the increasing availability of groupware, most systems are awkward and not widely used. While there are many reasons for this, a significant problem is that groupware is difficult to evaluate. In particular, there are no discount usability evaluation methodologies that can discover problems specific to teamwork. In this paper, we describe how we adapted Nielsen’s heuristic evaluation me...

In this paper we present an architecture for choosing a flexible response in a natural language system involved in information-seeking tasks. Our work considers the crucial issue of choosing what information to provide and how to structure it, considering from the generation perspective a model of dialogue that was previously developed to study the recognition activity of an agent. In such a mo...

The paper presents the results of a study on usability methods for evaluating Web sites. It summarizes the "Heuristics for Web Communications," and reports the practical experiences with these heuristics, contrasting them with the "Keevil Index" and combining them with user testing with thinking aloud. It concludes that working with the "Heuristics for Web Communications" takes more time and ef...

Today there are thousands of electronic shops accessible via the Web. Some provide user-friendly features whilst others seem not to consider usability factors at all. Yet, it is critical that the electronic shopping interface is userfriendly so as to help users to obtain their desired results. This study applied heuristic evaluation to examine the usability of current electronic shopping. In pa...

A gap exists between the growing prevalence of peripheral displays and appropriate methods for their evaluation. Mankoff et al. [11] present one attempt to bridge this gap by adapting Nielsen’s Heuristic evaluation to the defining characteristics and goals of peripheral displays. In this paper, we present a complementary approach that depends on active user participation and emphasizes the expe...

This study describes the design and development of Memotree a basic service platform for family social interaction. Memotree features a Family Tree which displays the family relationships and links among family members, with features to encourage family interaction based on the Family Communications Scale. The system and its associated hardware are designed to be optimally accessible to family ...