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.
REFERENCES
Abulfaraj, A. and Steele, A. (2020). Detailed usabil-
ity heuristics: A breakdown of usability heuristics
to enhance comprehension for novice evaluators. In
Stephanidis, C., Marcus, A., Rosenzweig, E., Rau, P.-
L. P., Moallem, A., and Rauterberg, M., editors, HCI
International 2020 - Late Breaking Papers: User Ex-
perience Design and Case Studies, pages 3–18, Cham.
Springer International Publishing.
AlTaboli, A. and Abou-Zeid, M. R. (2007). Effect of physi-
cal consistency of web interface design on users’ per-
formance and satisfaction. In Jacko, J. A., editor,
Human-Computer Interaction. HCI Applications and
Services, pages 849–858, Berlin, Heidelberg. Springer
Berlin Heidelberg.
Casare, A. R., Silva, C. G., Martins, P. S., and Moraes,
R. (2019). Mapping WCAG guidelines to Nielsen’s
heuristics. In Proceedings of the 16th International
Conference on Applied Computing, pages 79–88.
Granollers, T. (2018a). Usability Evaluation with Heuris-
tics, Beyond Nielsen’s List. In Proceedings of the
Eleventh International Conference on Advances in
Computer-Human Interactions (ACHI), pages 60–65.
Granollers, T. (2018b). Usability Evaluation with Heuris-
tics. New Proposal from Integrating Two Trusted
Sources. In Marcus, A. and Wang, W., editors, Design,
User Experience, and Usability: Theory and Practice,
pages 396–405. Springer International Publishing.
Kellogg, W. A. (1989). The dimensions of consistency. In
Coordinating User Interfaces for Consistency. Aca-
demic Press.
Molich, R. and Nielsen, J. (1990). Improving a human-
computer dialogue. Communications of the ACM,
33(3):338–348.
Moran, K. (2020). Usability Heuristic 4: Consis-
tency and Standards. Nielsen Norman Group.
https://www.nngroup.com/videos/usability-heuristic-
consistency-standards/ (video; accessed October 29,
2020).
Nielsen, J. (1994). Usability inspection methods. In Con-
ference Companion on Human Factors in Comput-
ing Systems, CHI ’94, page 413–414, New York, NY,
USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Nielsen, J. and Molich, R. (1990). Heuristic evaluation of
user interfaces. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Confer-
ence on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages
249 – 256.
Pribeanu, C. (2017). A revised set of usability heuristics
for the evaluation of interactive systems. Informatica
Economica, 21:31–38.
Rocha, H. V. and Baranauskas, M. C. C. (2003). De-
sign e Avaliac¸
˜
ao de Interfaces Humano-Computador.
NIED/UNICAMP.
Salgado, A. L. and Fortes, R. P. M. (2016). Heuristic evalu-
ation for novice evaluators. In Marcus, A., editor, De-
sign, User Experience, and Usability: Design Think-
ing and Methods, pages 387–398. Springer Interna-
tional Publishing.
Salgado, A. L., Lara, S., Freire, A., and Fortes, R. (2016).
What is hidden in a heuristic evaluation: tactics from
the experts. In CONTECSI USP - International Con-
ference on Information Systems and Technology Man-
agement - ISSN 2448-1041, pages 2931 – 2946.
Schlatter, T. and Levinson, D. (2013). Visual Usability Prin-
ciples and Practices for Designing Digital Applica-
tions. Elsevier.
Shneiderman, B. and Plaisant, C. (2004). Designing
the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-
Computer Interaction (4th Edition). Pearson Addison
Wesley.
Tanaka, T., Eberts, R. E., and Salvendy, G. (1991). Con-
sistency of human-computer interface design: Quan-
tification and validation. Human Factors, 33(6):653–
676.
W3C (2008). Web Content Accessibility
World Wide Web Consortium (WCAG) 2.0.
https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ (accessed October
29, 2020).
HUCAPP 2021 - 5th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction Theory and Applications
228