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of some works on providing detailed versions of their
heuristic sets may help to avoid some of the ambigui-
ties regarding H4 that were presented in this paper.
In any way we want to propose the creation of a
very detailed description of the fourth heuristic. How-
ever, we believe that generalizing and enhancing this
description would avoid some negative effects of its
literal interpretation, e.g. the detaching of inconsis-
tency problems in the HE report, or some situation in
which no other heuristic could be associated with the
inconsistency problem at hand.
This is an initial work regarding this theme. We
know that Nielsen’s heuristics were accepted and have
been adopted by the HCI community for decades, and
that they are general enough to be used to evaluate
the usability of many kinds of interfaces. Therefore,
our purpose here is to do a constructive criticism that
may enhance the comprehension of these heuristics
and reduce ambiguous interpretations.
We also believe that proposing changes to this
consolidated set of heuristics is a work that should
not be done according to the opinion of a small group
of researchers. Therefore, future work includes re-
searching how the HCI community classifies incon-
sistency problems in the Heuristic Evaluation, how
often the literal interpretation of the “Consistency and
standards” heuristic occurs, and promoting a discus-
sion of the need to change that description to over-
come interpretation problems.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank the grant #2015/21 from
FAEPEX/PRP/Unicamp.
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