This study highlights how heuristic evaluation as a usability evaluation method can feed into current building design practice to conform to universal design principles. It provides a definition of universal usability that is applicable to an architectural design context. It takes the seven universal design principles as a set of heuristics and applies an iterative sequence of heuristic evaluat...

Using the heuristic evaluation method, this research comprehensively investigated the usability of the website of the University of Jordan, the largest and oldest university in Jordan. The evaluators considered in their investigation the most frequently visited pages on the university’s website from the viewpoint of 237 students. The evaluators were also asked to visit all pages on the website ...

In this paper we present a new insertion-based construction heuristic to solve the multivehicle pickup and delivery problem with time windows. The new heuristic does not only consider the classical incremental distance measure in the insertion evaluation criteria but also the cost of reducing the time window slack due to the insertion. We also present a non-standard measure, Crossing Length Per...

In this paper we introduce a new algorithm for updating the parameters of a heuristic evaluation function, by updating the heuristic towards the values computed by an alpha-beta search. Our algorithm differs from previous approaches to learning from search, such as Samuel’s checkers player and the TD-Leaf algorithm, in two key ways. First, we update all nodes in the search tree, rather than a s...

In problem domains where an informative heuristic evaluation function is not known or not easily computed, abstraction can be used to derive admissible heuristic values. Optimal path lengths in the abstracted problem are consistent heuristic estimates for the original problem. Pattern databases are the traditional method of creating such heuristics, but they exhaustively compute costs for all a...

As a discount usability method, one often seeks maximum efficiency from the heuristic evaluation process. It may be tempting to seek efficiency by giving the raw problem descriptions generated by the evaluators to developers as the final problem reports. This does not work because these raw problem descriptions can not be used effectively by the development team. The detail provided by individu...