This paper describes the how heuristic reviews can benefit ambient displays and discusses why Nielsen's heuristics may not be appropriate for this technology (Nielsen's guidelines assume that the system will be interactive and task-oriented, whereas, ambient displays are periphery of a user's attention). Therefore, the authors devised a set of new heuristics for ambient displays and tested two ambient display systems using these new heuristics as well as Nielsen's heuristics.
Each system was evaluated with the ambient heuristics and with Nielsen's heuristics. Eight experts evaluated each system. Using a between-subjects design, each group used the ambient heuristics on one system and Nielsen's on the other system.
The results indicate that the ambient heuristics were an improvement on Nielsen's for this technology. The study showed that evaluators using the ambient heuristics were able to identify a larger percentage of the know usability issues with the system than using Nielsen's heuristics. However, various issues were identified using Nielsen's heuristics that weren't identified using the ambient set (i.e. error conditions). Therefore, the authors modified their heuristics to include five additional heuristics from Nielsen's system.
In future work, the authors plan to apply the final set of heuristics to a number of ambient displays (including the two systems evaluated in this study) and compare the results of the revised heuristics.
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