Usability heuristics for mobile learning applications

Heuristic evaluation is a fast and easy way to detect usability problems. Nielsen (1994) proposed ten heuristics that are being widely used to conduct heuristic evaluation. Utilizing these heuristics for mobile learning applications is not very effective because they are generic and were not developed taking mobile devices into consideration. In this research new heuristics were developed to extend Nielsen (1994) heuristics to support heuristic evaluation of mobile learning applications. Sixteen usability studies on mobile learning applications were retrieved from the literature, the listed usability problems were analyzed and three new heuristics were developed. The validation results indicate that using newly developed heuristics allow evaluators to detect more usability problems while evaluating mobile learning applications.