Heuristics for evaluating the usability of CAA applications

Evaluation of usability is well researched in the area of HCI. One widely used method is a heuristic evaluation which relies on a small number of evaluators inspecting an interface to see to what extent it complies with a set of heuristics. Once a problem is identified it is categorised to a heuristic and a severity rating is attached. Severity ratings indicate the potential impact of the problem. Using a corpus of usability problems within CAA this paper reports on the development of domain specific heuristics and severity ratings for evaluating the usability of CAA applications. The heuristics are presented and the paper concludes with practical guidance on the application of the method in CAA.