Appropriating Heuristic Evaluation for Mobile Computing - Human-Computer Interaction and Innovation in Handheld, Mobile and Wearable Technologies - page 39

The Purpose of Mobile Tasks CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

Mobile applications can be split into two broad
categories:

In this article, we have pointed out the benefit of
expert-based evaluation methods and their need
to capture contextual requirements in mobile
computing. We have, in the process, described
how we have analyzed mobile usability issues,
and discussed our efforts toward realizing a set
of usability heuristics that is relevant to mobile
computing. Our study confirms previous observa-
tions that mobile heuristics detect fewer cosmetic
problems and that, in any case, they should not be
considered as alternative to user studies, but syn-
ergic. In particular, as often noted when speaking
of inspection methods, we believe these are useful
techniques to use when we are in early phases of
design/prototyping, or when the low-cost issue is
particularly relevant to the evaluation. As far as
the false positives problem is concerned, the inter-
expert consistency found when applying mobile
heuristics may indicate that the flaws detected
were not false alarms, although empirical evalu-
ations with end users are the methods to uncover
and solve this issue. As part of our future work,
we intend to perform further literature analysis to
the work reported in the section entitled Method-
ology for Realizing Mobile Issues and possibly
consider more dimensions and at different levels
of abstraction.

1. Those where location matters
2. Those where it does not

Many of the heuristics apply to both categories
of application, but some apply more to one.
The first category includes location-aware
applications such as navigation, tourist informa-
tion, targeted advertising, and even augmented
reality. Heuristic 2 talks about the “Match between
system and the real world” and says the system
should “sense its environment and adapt the pre-
sentation of information accordingly”. Heuristic 3
mentions the importance of consistency between
users' actions and “the corresponding real tasks
(e.g. navigation in the real world)”. The ability of
applications to achieve these aims is often depen-
dent on hardware and environment, so additional
strategies are used, for example the provision
of several different landmarks to choose from,
given an imprecise GPS location (e.g., Cheverst
et al., 2000). Few location-aware systems include
electronic compasses or gyroscopes, so directional
consistency is particularly hard to maintain.
The second category is not simply the negation
of the first, but the opposite: those applications that
you specifically want to be able to do anywhere,
such as being able to phone, access email, read
electronic documents, write in a word processor.
In these applications the aim is to unshackle the
user from the need to be physically in a particular
place. Some of these are where the user wants ac-
cess to remote resources from anywhere, and in
this case issues of data and network connectivity
may be important. For other applications in this
category the data is local, but issues of screen
size, portability and dangers of data loss become
more significant.

REFERENCES

Braam, P. J. (1998). The Coda Distributed File
System. Linux Journal, 50 .

Chalmers, M., & Galani, M. (2004). Seamful
Interweaving: Heterogenity in the Theory and
Design of Interac-tive Systems. In Proceedings of
the ACM Designing Interactive Systems - DIS'04
Conference .