Abstract:

In recent years we have seen a rapid proliferation of applications for older people as embedded information technologies have expanded into almost all sectors of the economy: government, industry, commerce, education and health. These scientific and technical advances have made usability assessment of software systems particularly important for the development of stable and quality applications. The purpose of this study is to present the results of a formative usability evaluation of a mobile application that allows the user to monitor his/her wellbeing and quality of life, called vINCI app. In order to carry out this task, heuristic evaluation is the chosen method for identifying and documenting usability problems. The method considers a small set of evaluators that examine the application interface and evaluate it using recognized principles of usability, called heuristics. The results obtained from the evaluation based on a set of specific tasks with clearly defined objectives have highlighted a series of usability issues that will be presented to developers with the recommendation to be remedied in the next development iterations.