Usability Heuristics for Mobile Applications - A Systematic Review

Usability is one of the factors that most affects a software quality. The increasing adoption of mobile devices brings new usability challenges, as well as a need for specific standards for this type of product. This paper aims to conduct a systematic review of the literature, complemented by a manual and snowballing search to obtain usability heuristics and heuristic evaluations for mobile applications. The result of the study was a set of thirteen usability heuristics, specific to smartphones, related to the ten Nielsen’s heuristics. In addition, five possible ways of evaluating the usability of mobile applications are described. The specification of the heuristics found shows that they can be used both for the evaluation of already developed applications and for the prototyping of new applications, which helps developers achieve their goals regarding product quality. The main contributions of this work is the compilation of desktop usability heuristics in a new, more specific set of heuristics adapted to the mobile paradigm.