Use Of Experts' Gaze By Novice Usability Practitioners To Perform A Better Heuristic Evaluation

Proficiency in conducting heuristic evaluations does not come easily; it is an acquired skill that takes years to master. It is often difficult to convey an effective evaluation strategy through a verbal approach. While communicating verbally, people may prompt to where they focus their attention, but this is often difficult to convey. Through an eye tracking study, the relationship between an expert's gaze while performing a task and a novice's learning to better perform a heuristic evaluation will be explored. Novices concentrate on basic, but irrelevant parts of a task while processing complex stimuli whereas experts process stimuli quicker while focusing on relevant aspects. Finding a way to convey this to a novice would make a novice's approach quicker and more efficient than before. It has already been shown in a couple of different domains that watching an expert's gaze is useful to novices in performing certain tasks. Through this study, it will be shown that this method of knowledge transfer can be extended to the heuristic evaluation process.