Exploitation of heuristics for virtual environments

Although generic usability heuristics lists have been popular with researchers and practitioners, emerging new technologies have called for more specific heuristics. One of these heuristics was proposed by Sutcliffe and Gault in 2004 [37]. This paper examines research which has cited these heuristics with the aim to see how it has been exploited. The results showed that a fifth of the papers citing the heuristics have used the heuristics fully or partly, and that researchers have adapted it to their current needs. Following this result we proposed that a patchwork of heuristics might be more useful than a single list. We evaluated a crisis management training simulator using the virtual reality heuristics and discussed how the outcome of the evaluation fitted the patchwork.