Usevalia: managing inspection-based usability audits

Abstract

Heuristic evaluation provides usability auditors with a structured flow of activities that enables them to obtain reliable, comparable and cost-effective usability evaluation results. Tools supporting heuristic evaluation are scarce in literature. Usevalia is an Internet-based tool that manages usability audits on the basis of heuristic evaluation. This article presents the main features of Usevalia, together with a validation of the software by following the Technology Acceptance Model, which verified the users’ perceptions of Usevalia as regards usefulness, ease of use, attitude and intention to use. A total of 22 students enrolled on a human–computer interaction course were involved in the validation. According to the results of the survey conducted with them, the proposed tool is easy to use (MD=4.00 out of 5) and useful for conducting usability audits based on heuristic evaluation (MD=4.00 out of 5). An expert-based validation was also carried out in order to thoroughly compare Usevalia’s features with those of a spreadsheet-based tool that performs usability audits in the traditional manner. This comparative analysis made it possible to conclude that the Usevalia tool has a higher perceived usefulness (M=4.43) and perceived ease of use (M=4.13) than a traditional audit tool, such as the Usability Datalogger spreadsheet (M=2.43 and M=3.03, respectively).