The Challenges of Evaluating the Usability of Augmented Reality (AR)

Augmented reality (AR) is a new and emerging technology that could benefit from evaluating its usability to better the user’s experience with the device or application. This is often done through usability testing and heuristic evaluations. However, AR technology presents some challenges when completing these usability evaluations. Practitioners need to keep in mind the hardware limitations of AR devices that may not be present with other computerized technology, consistency of the users’ environment plays a larger role in the AR experience, recognize that a novelty effect may occur and affect subjective scores, and choose heuristic sets that will best evaluate AR applications. Practitioners need to be aware of these challenges and overcome them to accurately assess the usability of these products to gain insights about what should be changed to make the overall experience with the product better

Mobile Augmented Reality System Design Guidelines Based on Tourist’s Emotional State

Individual’s emotional states may change and influence their behavior when using mobile application. Studying the behavior and emotional state of user are necessary in the design of a Mobile Augmented Reality System and should be based on a good design principle. The design principle is useful as a guidance to develop a good mobile AR system. This paper will present a design guideline for Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) for tourism. From the analysis of existing design guidelines of Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) for tourism, an application design guidelines are proposed based on PAD’s theory, Human-computer Interaction and Usability principles. The design principle is to reduce cognitive overhead of tourist, learnability and suitable context for users. Six design principles were examined in this analysis. The analysis identified eleven suggestions for design principles and these recommendations are offered towards the design principles and developing prototype application for tourist in Malaysia