Heuristic Evaluation for Augmentative and Alternative Communication Application: A Case Study

Recently, there has been a growing trend of interest in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), a type of tool for helping people with developmental disabilities communicate. With the advancement of mobile technology, AAC applications are being actively developed and released. However, there are no standardized guidelines to design AAC applications, so each application has different functions and interfaces. The purpose of this study is to verify the applicability and usefulness of design guidelines for AAC. To achieve that purpose, we developed checklists for AAC using Nielsen's usability principles and performed a case study evaluating AAC applications to identify usability issues using the heuristic evaluation method. As a result, a total of 39 usability issues were found and severity scores were obtained for each heuristic. Through the checklist developed in this study, usability issues could be identified more effectively. In particular, checklists related to symbols and voices played a role in enhancing the understanding of AAC characteristics. If checklists are improved by reflecting the opinions of actual users, they could be used as design guidelines in the future.