A Heuristic Evaluation Experiment to Validate the New Set of Usability Heuristics

The choice of one or other usability principles to carryout a heuristic evaluation is one of the most difficult tasks in the planning of a heuristic evaluation. We have considered that the heuristics used until now, basicallyNielsen´s, do not cover all usability features for any interactive systems and we show two real experiences to justify it. In a previous work, we reviewed usability heuristics definitions that appeared from 1986 to now and we found a lot of repeated principles that we summarized in 16 usability categories. In this work, we present a validation of them. The validation consists on a comparison between two sets of heuristics (these 16categories and our old set of categories based on the well-known Nielsen´ set of heuristics) and differences relating to the amount of problems that each set has found in the same interactive system.