Adapting Nielsen's Usability Heuristics to the Context of Mobile Augmented Reality

TL;DR

This paper examines how Nielsen's usability heuristics can be adapted for mobile augmented reality (AR) apps, focusing on AR home design applications to address usability challenges and guide future design guidelines.

Contribution

It extends traditional usability heuristics to the mobile AR context, providing initial insights and considerations for designing user-friendly AR applications.

Findings

Designers should consider user unfamiliarity with AR technology.

Technological limitations impact AR app usability.

First step towards establishing AR-specific heuristics.

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging technology in mobile app design during recent years. However, usability challenges in these apps are prominent. There are currently no established guidelines for designing and evaluating interactions in AR as there are in traditional user interfaces. In this work, we aimed to examine the usability of current mobile AR applications and interpreting classic usability heuristics in the context of mobile AR. Particularly, we focused on AR home design apps because of their popularity and ability to incorporate important mobile AR interaction schemas. Our findings indicated that it is important for the designers to consider the unfamiliarity of AR technology to the vast users and to take technological limitations into consideration when designing mobile AR apps. Our work serves as a first step for establishing more general heuristics and guidelines for mobile AR.