Heuristic Evaluation in Visualization: An Empirical Study : Position paper

Heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method that has been adapted to evaluate visualization applications through the development of specific sets of heuristics. This paper presents an empirical study meant to assess the capacity of the method to anticipate the usability issues noticed by users when using a visualization application. The potential usability problems identified by 20 evaluators were compared with the issues found for the same application by 46 users through a usability test, as well as with the fixes recommended by the experimenters observing those users during the test. Results suggest that using some heuristics may have elicited potential problems that none of the users noticed while using the application; on the other hand, users encountered unpredicted usability issues.