Guiding Usability Newcomers to Understand the Context of Use: Towards Models of Collaborative Heuristic Evaluation

Usability inspection methods are liable to the expertise effect among distinct evaluators. Hence, understanding the difficulties faced by evaluators of low expertise (novices and newcomers) is a requirement to move forward in the field. However, the following question remains: Which of the terms that compose usability (User, Goal, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Satisfaction, Context of Use and Task) is the most difficult for newcomers to understand? This exploratory study aims to compare usability newcomers’ difficulties on understanding different terms that compose the usability, based on the definition showed by the ISO/IEC 25066. To achieve this goal, we conducted a survey with 38 usability newcomers. Observations on our survey show the Context of Use may be the most difficult term to be understood by newcomers. Thus, we suggest the adoption of scenarios, storyboards, and domain-specific principles as the basis for newcomers in HEs, when practitioners cannot count on experts for the inspection. In addition, we suggest three (3) different models of Collaborative Heuristic Evaluation aimed to provide newcomers with important insights about Context of Use. Finally, we suggest as future works to study the validity of such models.