The Development of Usability Heuristics For Arabic M-Commerce Applications

Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce) applications are becoming popular among Arab population. The applications have been considered as a necessity in their life for performing online transactions such as buying goods. For these reasons, it is necessary to build M-Commerce applications that are similar to online websites in terms of its usability and to avoid usability problems which may lead to frustration. In addition, users expect these applications to support their native language; Arabic language adds extra challenges when it comes to designing a usable User Interface (UI). Having a set of heuristics to evaluate Arabic M-Commerce is crucial to these goals. The current heuristics for M-Commerce were developed without considering UI for Arabic M-Commerce applications. This paper presents a set of heuristics for evaluating the UI of Arabic M-Commerce. The presented heuristics are divided into six categories, including: Search and Findability, Visual Design, Translatability, Consistency, User Control and Freedom, and Adaptability. The process of developing the proposed heuristics includes three stages; firstly, generating draft heuristics based on the literature review study, and then the draft was reviewed by three HCI experts, and finally the modified heuristics after expert review were sent out for a final evaluation by a usability expert community. An online survey has been used to collect data from the community. The obtained comments and suggestions from the community were used to finalize the proposed set of heuristics, which are presented in this paper.

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