Adapting Nielsen's Usability Heuristics to the Context of Mobile Augmented Reality
This work addresses usability issues for mobile AR app designers, but it is incremental as it adapts existing heuristics rather than creating new ones.
The study examined usability challenges in mobile augmented reality (AR) apps, focusing on AR home design apps, and found that designers must account for user unfamiliarity with AR and technological limitations.
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.