Visual Clarity Checker (VC2) to support heuristic evaluation: To what extent does VC2 help evaluators?

Visual clarity checking is one of the criteria to assess when performing heuristic evaluation (HE). HE, as we already aware, is a practice where the usability experts use their expertise and knowledge in assessing websites or systems. Whilst the practice is commonly performed manually, using tools in HE would theoretically assist the experts, but to what extent? This paper attempts to answer the posed question by performing a comparison study of a paired t-test or repeated measure t-test (within subject) between heuristic experts. They performed a HE on an e-commerce website under two conditions: normal HE method, and, HE assisted with Visual Clarity Checker (VC2) tool. The results of the experiment, shows the use of VC2 was helpful in issues compilation; as it does help the experts to at least find issues that are explicitly related to visual clarity of images and categorized them accordingly. But not all issues are incorporated in the final HE report, as the consideration is made by the experts. The feedback about the usage of the tool however are mixed, as the experts found it as time consuming to analyze the VC2 results.