G4NHE: uma gamificação genérica para permitir a aplicação do G4H com qualquer conjunto de heurísticas de usabilidade

Abstract

Heuristic Evaluation is an inspection method widely used to evaluate the usability of interactive systems. However, the common discrepancy between individual severity ratings, attributed by evaluators to problems found, is one of the problems that impair the validity and reliability of this method. Thus, some studies applied Collaborative Heuristic Evaluation to reduce the problem impacts. One such proposal is G4H (Game for Heuristic Evaluation), a gamification developed as a card game to motivate and engage the different evaluators during the Heuristic Evaluation results' consolidation task. Although, this gamification was designed to support only the Nielsen’s usability heuristics. Considering this context, the present work presents G4NHE (Game for aNy Heuristic Evaluation), a generic gamification developed to allow the use of G4H with any usability heuristics set. For this, several usability heuristics sets were selected and analyzed to identify common and distinct characteristics, which, in turn, made it possible to find out which adaptations are necessary to adapt G4H to the characteristics identified. Therefore, the generic solutions for these adaptations were created, originating the G4NHE and its specialization guide. To validate the proposal, two experimental studies were applied. The purpose of the first validation was to evaluate the specialization guide effectiveness, while the purpose of the second validation was to evaluate the proposed new rules acceptance. From the perception of the participating users, it can be concluded that the G4NHE allows a rich and effective discussion about the problems found in a Heuristic Evaluation, increasing the evaluators' motivation. However, it was also apparent the difficulty in understanding and performing the specialization guide activities, as well as the lack of information in the new rules, which caused doubts during the gamification rounds. Finally, the improvements suggestions obtained in the experimental evaluation were considered to generate a refined version of the G4NHE and its specialization guide, which involved existing rules sets.