Mihir Janaj

Applying Heuristic Evaluation to Wearable Devices - Usability Analysis of Smart watch applications based on Heuristics

Wearable Technology has gradually rooted itself into our daily lives. Along with the technological advancement they are equipped with, a critical part which has led to a wide acceptance by the masses; are its effective User Interfaces. Evaluating these interfaces is an important task as they define and influence the User experience. Heuristic Evaluation is an informal method of judging the User Interfaces on the basis of a set of Heuristics and finding out issues which affect usability of applications. Heuristics are the usability principles an application should contain in order to achieve better usability. It is a cost effective method of evaluation where three to five evaluators participate in the analysis of User Interfaces. Smart Watches are one of  the most popular type of Wearable Devices which have a User Interface. This presented an opportunity to test the effectiveness of Heuristic Evaluation on them. This thesis is an extension of a previous Master Thesis by Rovina Maria Miranda(2014) which concentrated on Mobile Device Applications User Interfaces. It examines the extent of validity of Heuristic Evaluation for User Interfaces of Smart Watches applications as well as proposes the probable Heuristics which can improve its results.