Towards an Emotional Validation of Heuristic Approaches for Usability Evaluation

Resumen

This paper presents an initial investigation on how an emotional assessment of user interfaces may extend and validate the heuristic evaluation of the usability of interactive systems. Through the elicitation of responses from two groups of users, we focused on detecting whether a correlation exists between emotional assessment of specific interface issues and the corresponding evaluation by interaction experts. Using a prototypical multi-tactile interface and a heuristic approach, we first obtained feedback from interaction experts regarding its potential problems and issues. We then devised scenarios for observing novel users and eliciting their emotional re-sponses to the issues raised by our experts. Our initial findings indicate a significant correlation exists between the issues raised by expert users and the emotional responses of novel users, but also that some of those issues do not necessarily lead to long lasting negative emotions. Wethus posit that emotional evaluation of interactive systems may be helpful for enriching and validating heuristic approaches for usability evaluation.